


Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell

by veecamaro3



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 1971 Camaro, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Bobby SInger - Freeform, Camaro - Freeform, Classic Cars, Classic Rock, Crossroads Deals & Demons, Dean Winchester - Freeform, Dean Winchester Loves The Impala, Demon Dean Winchester, Demon/Human Relationships, Demons, F/M, Family, Hunters & Hunting, John Winchester - Freeform, Men of Letters Bunker (Supernatural), Rock and Roll, Sam Winchester - Freeform, Sam Winchester's Demonic Powers, Supernatural - Freeform, Supernatural Elements, The Impala (Supernatural), castiel - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:06:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 207,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25259674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veecamaro3/pseuds/veecamaro3
Summary: After John Winchester's wife was murdered in their home, Missouri Moseley sent him to Mark Cooper, a supernatural hunter, to learn of the things that go bump in the night.18 years later, John is still on the hunt for the demon that killed his wife. Mark and his daughter, Harley, find the fabled Colt, but Mark is killed before he can give his friend the weapon to end it all. Instead, Harley delivers the gun to John and acquires a new hunting partner - her childhood best friend, Dean.***UPDATE***1/11/21 - Chapter 1 is brand-spankin-new. Enjoy! :)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 7





	1. Initium Casus

**Author's Note:**

> Dear New Readers (and returning readers, somewhat),  
> 
> 
> I've been at war with this fic since 2012. I was 19 and I loved Supernatural, but I also had serious self-esteem issues and fantasies that borderlined on delusions. I was alone, miserable, and I wanted to create something where I wouldn't be those things for a bit (writing this 9 years later I realize how things never change...). I had already failed at acting, where it would have been a lot easier to pretend to be someone else, so I took to writing instead. But I wanted to be with my favorite characters in their world. 
> 
> That's where the chapters "Wendigo" through "Faith" came in. I remember wanting to follow the storyline, not copy the goddamn scripts, but somehow I couldn't tear myself away from the path I had started on. I wanted to establish some sort of relationship between Harley and Dean, which I did, but without altering the script enough. I also remember envisioning the car crash at the end of season 1, and the "In My Time Of Dying" episode, and thinking, Damn I really need to get there, keep writing you'll get there. That was goal #1 (achieved!). I also had visions of what Harley and ultimately Sam would go through after Dean gets taken to Hell. That's goal #2. It's some juicy shit, and Cas is involved, so stay tuned.
> 
> What I'd like to apologize for are those 10 chapters I mentioned before. If you look at them in retrospect and extract the bare minimum of what I created (not copied from the script), they're good. They were supposed to be stepping stone chapters to establish the relationship between Harley, Sam, Dean and John without just starting the story in the middle of it all and having most of the conversation be "Hey, remember that time when..." I didn't expect them to be that...plagiarized. And it drives me up the fucking wall that I spent 5 fucking years writing them.
> 
> In 2016, I called it quits for a while. I picked it up again in 2019, but it wasn't until 2020 that I finally put my foot down and said FUCK IT, this is MY goddamn story!! And I took the reins. I was tired of waiting. I was ashamed of those 10 chapters (still am). But I thought, what I'm coming up with now, all within the last year, impresses even myself, and that's really hard to do. I wrote "Initium Casus" to give a little more insight to Harley and Mark Cooper. I recall starting the "Wendigo" chapter with Harley driving away from the scene of her dad's death because I was too fucking lazy to write it out. I wanted to hurry up and get started. And as bad as that sounds, I'm glad it ended up like that because what I wound up writing 8 years later is better than anything I could have come up with way back when.
> 
> This letter is basically a plea. Try chapter 1, "Initium Casus". If you enjoy it, you'll really like chapter 15, "Devil's Trap". "Scarecrow", "Nightmare" and "Shadow" are obviously copied from the show, but I finally mastered the level of script integration with my own creation, and THOSE are the chapters I want you to get to. Unfortunately there's 10 chapters of shit in between. Who knows, maybe some people will like those 10 chapters. My friend, who hates to read but is actually reading this story (slowly), says it's an interesting alternative to the beginning of the show and that Harley is a fucked up character that adds a great dynamic to Sam and Dean. So apparently those 10 chapters are good, but the good is buried under miles of copyright infringement. 
> 
> I think what I'm also trying to say is, I hate those original 10 chapters with a passion, but don't completely skip them. If you don't have the patience to read nearly 130 pages worth of whatever the hell I came up with, skim over them, try to get the gist of the stuff that's not the script, and I promise you'll be rewarded with the later chapters. :)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is basically a prequel to my original story. You'll learn about Mark Cooper, his relationship with John, and some things from their past.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was actually pretty difficult for me to write this chapter. I did more research on it than I ever did for a project in school. 25 pages of basically original content, not a half-regurgitated SPN script? Damn. And I decided to include a POV from the demons! 
> 
> I had no idea how to write in Hell. Like, what do we really know about Hell? No one can picture it, the same way we can’t picture Heaven. I get that a few episodes take place in Hell and they use the meatsuits there, but like, they HAVE to. They needed the visual. So writing in Hell was very fucking difficult. No body language. No actions. I wasn’t even planning on doing dialogue. Anyway. Hope you like it.
> 
> Here’s how the Hell part first started out when I was stumped and just fucking around:  
> Welcome to Hell. Population: Fuck if I know. Lucifer reins but he’s in a cage. Yet he searches for a vessel on Earth. None are to his satisfaction, so he bestows a mighty quest upon Azazel: create the perfect vessel!
> 
> "Azazel" is a demon name. He's actually a real demon, too, pretty top dog. Meg and Tom, his “children”, aren’t demon names, so I couldn’t use them in Hell. I did some research on real demons and picked a few names I liked. I also added another son because I need him for later.
> 
> Enjoy :)

Harvelle’s Roadhouse is most frequented by hunters, but it’s well known for its carefully selected archive of bourbon. As soon as my dad agreed I was old enough to drink, I decided then and there I’d try everything Ellen has to offer. I’m about halfway through, currently in the Buffalo Trace collection. I sip Single Oak Project on the rocks as my dad thoughtfully thinks of his next trivia question. He hums the chorus to the song on the jukebox, then sings the last line: _“Take it to the limit one more time…”_

“Oh!” he finally exclaims. “I have one. What was the Eagles’ most played song at their concerts?”

Overly confident, I smirk, scoff, and immediately reply: “ _Hotel California.”_

“Oh, Harley, come on. I’ve taught you better than that,” Dad scolds me.

“Then what is it, O Wise One?”

“ _Take It Easy_. I have to say, I’m a little disappointed.”

I roll my eyes. “Hey, Dad, who explained to who what an iPod was, and how it could hold all of the cassettes you lug around in a duffel bag in a rectangle the size of your palm?”

With a glower, Dad drains the last of his drink. “Another round, O Sarcastic One?”

“I learn from the best,” I say, grinning.

While Dad goes to the bar for a refill, I head over to the jukebox. The outside is old and scratched, there’s a chunk missing out of the left bottom corner. Damage from a barfight, no doubt. But the music selection is superb. As I scroll through the title cards, the only permanent resident of the Roadhouse, aside from the Harvelle’s, saunters up to the jukebox and casually leans against it.

“Your eyes are bluer than the Atlantic ocean,” he purrs. “And I don't mind being lost at sea.”

“My eyes are brown, Ash,” I respond dully.

Ash chuckles bashfully. “Right.”

“Also, that line was lame. I liked, _‘Hey, my name's Microsoft. Can I crash at your place?_ ’ better.”

“If you liked it, why didn’t you have a drink with me?”

I make my selection on the jukebox and turn to Ash. The skinny, pale midwestern MIT educated mullet-head that lives in a bar and has an extensive hunting knowledge but still can’t come up with a decent pick-up line. “Because I didn’t want to. Have you ever tried just saying hello?”

With a frown, Ash says, “No.”

“Try it, buddy.” I pat his chest and turn away as _Armageddon It_ plays.

“Def Leppard, huh? Well, I’ll miss you in a heartbeat!” Ash calls as I head to the table, where my dad returned with the drinks.

I look back over my shoulder and grin. “That one’s _almost_ acceptable.” I sit down and take a grateful drink of bourbon. Hmm, the Single Oak one isn’t bad, but I think I like Van Winkle’s better.

“He giving you trouble again?” Dad asks with a beady glare at Ash.

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

He chuckles. “Don’t I know it.”

“So, what’s the game plan? Where do we go next?” I ask.

“Hold your horses there, kiddo. We’re having a drink. Taking down that crocotta wasn’t easy. We’re enjoying a well-deserved break.”

I slump back against my chair. “I know. Just curious if you had any other leads we can look into.” Dad narrows his eyes. “Look into _later_ ,” I add with a mumble.

Across the bar, a new patron calls out, “Mark Cooper!” My dad and I both look over as a balding man in faded jeans with a gun in his holster approaches us. He claps my dad on the back and then smiles sweetly at me; I return it. “And Harley. Growing up fast.”

“Hey, Morton,” Dad says pleasantly. He’s pretty popular among hunters. He gets greeted this way nearly every time we enter a hunter’s bar.

“Haven’t seen you in over a year. Where you been hiding?”

“Not hiding, Morton. Hunting. That begs the question, where have _you_ been hiding?”

Morton chuckles heartily. “I’ve been around, here and there. Hey, now that I see ya, you know anything about Nix?”

“Water wraiths? Morton, what are you doing hunting water wraiths in Nebraska?”

“South Dakota, actually. I’ve been tracking some sort of water spirit up at Bitter Lake for a couple years now. Figured it was a Neck from the cycle of its’ killings.”

“Huh.” Dad takes a thoughtful sip. “Get a drink and have a seat.” Morton heads off to the bar and Dad looks over at me. “What do you remember about Nix?”

“A…bit.”

Dad smiles and takes another drink. “Good. Let Morton know what you remember.”

Of course. Dad never passes on a teaching moment. I wrack my brain for any mention of Germanic water wraiths I may have had since I started hunting. We don’t come across many water wraiths in general. The stuff I know is mainly from lore, not experience.

Morton returns with a pint and falls heavily into the chair at our table. He takes a long drink, leaving foam in his mustache, before turning to my dad. “So. Nix.” 

Dad grins and looks at me. 

“Um, well,” I begin. Clear my throat. “Are you dealing with Nix or Nixies?”

“Not sure yet. Haven’t seen it up close. All I have to go on are the drownings. A handful of them twice a year, around the heart of summer and dead of winter. The rest of the year, drownings are rare and most of the time witnessed.”

“Okay. Well, what are the victims? Male? Female? If it’s a Neck you’ve got half a chance. They only go after women and children. Nixies, the females, prey on men.”

Morton ponders this for a moment, then his eyes narrow with realization. “They’re all men.”

I nod. “You’ll need silver or iron. Not only to physically harm the Nixie, but to protect yourself as you search for it. There’s only two ways–”

“Harley,” Dad says gently. I stop spewing words at the speed of light. “You’re missing a few vital things.”

“Um,” I say again, rather ungracefully.

Dad smiles. “Mort, Nix are water wraiths, but they’re also avid shapeshifters. You’ll need to figure out what form the Nixie takes on before you attempt to hunt it down. If the Nix become human or merpeople, they lure their victims in with songs sung in spellbinding voices, hypnotizing their prey and drawing them into the water. If they take on the form of an animal, usually a white horse, the charm of their music is replaced with dazzling beauty.”

“So I need to get some earplugs, avoid looking at any pretty animals, and then wait for the Nixie to approach me so I can stab it with a silver dagger?” Morton says enthusiastically.

“Not quite,” I say. “That’s what I was getting to. There’s only two real ways to kill Nix: you need to find and speak their true name, or get them out of the lake long enough for them to die. They can’t be away from water for extended lengths of time.”

“That’s where the iron and silver come in,” Dad says. “Once you know which form they take, you can bind them on dry land with chains.”

“Or a harness,” I add quickly. “I remember reading something…farmers wanted the power of the Nix horses to plow their fields. They’d trick the Nix onto land, usually with some pretty girl, and force it into a harness of iron and silver. They’d work it until it died.”

“Where the hell am I gonna get an iron and silver harness?” Morton asks.

“You have plenty of time until the summer,” I say. “They only hunt at the summer and winter solstice. That’s the cycles you mentioned before.”

Dad nods receptively and goes on. “There’s a high chance the Nixie will be a human or mermaid, especially if you and another man hunt it down. If the Nixie is human, it will come onto land, seduce you, and drag you back to the lake. If it’s a mermaid, it will lure you into the water.”

“Morton, do you need any help?” I ask suddenly. “Having a girl there would really work in your favor, especially if the Neck is feminine. You could be the bait, and I’ll bind it in chains.”

Morton’s eyebrows furrow and he looks contemptuously at my dad. Then, he grins wildly at me and lets out a booming laugh. “Harley, you are _just_ like your old man.” He reaches over to clap me on the shoulder the same way he did my dad, so I quickly brace myself against the table so I don’t slam face first into it. “Thanks, Mark. And Harley. I’ll give you a call come the solstice.”

“Awesome,” I say cheerily.

Dad and I are alone again. At this point, I’d really like to know what we’re going to do next. I think he senses my impending question because he quickly says, “Okay, I’ve got another one. Which band had a pattern of releasing a live album every four studio albums?”

I lean back in the chair and temple my fingers under my chin. This time, I’ll weigh my answers carefully. That Eagles debacle was a serious insult to my talents. While I don’t outright remember which band my dad’s talking about, I’ll stall or utilize my two-question allowance. 

“Hmm.” Slowly, I reach forward for my glass. Take a sip. Then another. Dad rolls his eyes. Okay, utilize question one. I have to be careful, though. There are some questions he refuses to answer. “What’s their record company?”

With a sigh, Dad stares intently at me. I must have gotten close. He’s never reluctant in answering or denying my questions. It’s either a flat out no or an immediate answer. I grin, because I know I have him now.

“Moon Records,” he finally says.

“Ha! It’s Rush!” 

Dad rolls his eyes again. “I knew that answer would give it away.”

“Then you shouldn’t have said it. The fact that you did means you thought I wouldn’t guess right. Therefore, I say again: _Ha!”_

“Mmhmm. You’re pushing your luck, kid. I might not be so lenient later.”

“We’ll see,” I say knowingly. “One more round before we hit the road?”

“Sure.”

I take our glasses and head to the bar. Ellen’s working solo tonight, so I thought I’d give her one less table to clean up.

“Hi, honey,” Ellen greets me warmly. “Single Oak again?”

“No, I think I’ll go back to the Van Winkle this last time.”

“The usual for Mark?”

“Please.”

Ellen puts our used glasses in a basin of soapy water and pulls out two fresh ones. She selects a tall, narrow bottle, nearly empty, for me, and a stout, rectangular bottle for my dad. That one’s practically full. Ellen wrinkles her nose as she pours it.

“You know, your daddy and John Winchester are the only two men who like this stuff,” she says disapprovingly. “I haven’t had to re-stock it in years.”

I shrug and take the glasses. “It will be a while before I decide on which one I like best.”

“You take your time, honey.”

I smile and return to our table. I stare down into the amber liquid of Larceny before handing it over. That reminds me…“Have you heard from John since New York?”

“No, I haven’t.” Dad stares down at his drink the same way I had, only his face darkens.

New York was five months ago, when two American passenger planes decimated the World Trade Center. Most of the country is convinced that terrorists hijacked the planes. Some believe it was an inside job. Hunters, well, you can imagine what we thought.

Everyone was calling everyone. The entire time my dad and I drove to Manhattan we were each on the phone with someone or other. Apparently there was an unspoken consensus that hunters would meet there. Dean Winchester called me at one point, and we talked for the first time in over two years. His dad and mine are very close friends, and Dean and I were best friends as kids. We practically grew up together. But I haven’t seen him since we were teenagers.

Dean said John was heading to New York. I asked him if he was going, but he wasn’t. He’s been branching off from his dad, leaving to hunt something on his own now and then. John still likes to keep tabs on Dean, though, and that annoys him. If Dean doesn’t check in every night, there’s hell to pay.

I informed Dean that I beat his record for field stripping a Kimber Compact 1911. He immediately denied any such claim, but I said my dad kept time and would vouch for me. Dean wasn’t happy. 1911’s are a piece of cake to field strip, but reassembly is a bitch. We’ve been racing since we were ten.

At first, we were both north of two minutes. Gradually we got faster. I was in the lead for a good two years, timing in at 83 seconds. At age fourteen, around the time we stopped seeing each other, Dean had me at 58 seconds and was only getting quicker. I was getting quicker, too, but not as fast. Two years ago, before we lost contact, Dean plateaued at 39 seconds. I was at 44 seconds. Well, as of June 18, 2001, the record became 21 seconds. Dean threatened to hang up the phone.

Then things got serious. I updated Dean on where we were in The Search. My dad met John in 1984, a couple months after John’s wife was killed by some supernatural entity, and has been helping John hunt the son of a bitch for 19 years. Even after all this time, John will never give up, and my dad would never turn his back on him.

Recently, the focus of The Search turned to fires instead of the type of creature that was in John’s youngest boy’s nursery. John’s wife was pinned to the ceiling of Sam’s nursery when John found her. She was dead, blood gushing from a wound across her belly. Then she caught fire, but not like any fire John had ever seen before. It started from behind her body and, as John described it, it ‘leaped out at him’. The more he thought about it over the years, the more it felt like the fire had a purpose, like it wanted to keep him away. Like something was controlling it.

So, between our day jobs of hunting monsters, we became pyrologists. Learning how fires start, how quickly they spread. About arson and strange fires, ones with no explanation. There are plenty of evil entities that control fire, we just had to do the research.

Dean and I agreed that we all needed to meet. I was sure that John and my dad would talk that day, either on the phone or at the wreckage site, but they didn’t. That was the last time we heard from the Winchesters.

“We should call them,” I say. “Check in.”

Dad takes a long drink. “You’re right. It’s been long enough.”

¨ ¨ ¨

The perpetual darkness is only ever pierced by the fires of Hell. Among the flames, Azazel waits comfortably on the throne, a throne he has become accustomed to in the absence of its true owner. After all, he _is_ the interim Ruler of Hell, so isn’t he allowed a bit of entitlement?

Azazel’s plans, plans based on Lucifer’s orders, are coming along splendidly. His brothers, the remaining three of the four Princes of Hell produced by Lucifer’s own hand, lost interest in the King of Hell’s personal vendetta against God and turned their backs on him to live on Earth, among the very beings Lucifer despises. Azazel can’t even fathom the idea of betraying his creator.

Long ago, Lucifer’s rebellion against God and their disagreement on the perfection of the human race saw Lucifer banned from Heaven. Lucifer, enraged by God’s actions, took one of the early humans and stripped her of her humanity, tempting and twisting her soul until she became the very first demon. God, enraged by Lucifer’s actions, ordered Michael to lock Lucifer in a cage of God’s own design, closed tight with over 600 Seals of protection in the deepest, darkest pits of Hell.

Over a millennia Lucifer remained in the Cage, plotting his escape and return to Earth and Heaven, until ever faithful Azazel finally discovered the Cage itself, nearly 200 years ago. Lucifer’s plans could finally take light.

Tasked with releasing Lucifer from his Cage, starting the impending Apocalypse, and finding a suitable vessel for Lucifer once he walks free, Azazel set out on his mission with, ironically, the same devotion Lucifer once showed God.

The Apocalypse could only come with Lucifer’s release. Lucifer’s release required breaking 66 of the 600 or more Seals locking him within the Cage. The Seals are metaphorical locks, events which need to occur in order to release the prisoner, and with over 600 Seals to choose from…well, Azazel had his work cut out for him.

As loyal as he may be, Azazel soon discovered he personally did not have the ability to break any of the Seals. Lucifer ordered Azazel to find and release Lilith, the first demon. Lilith had gotten herself trapped neck-deep in Hell, rendering her unable to leave on her own power. If _Lilith_ couldn’t free herself, Azazel definitely couldn’t. That just further complicated things.

Azazel searched for a few centuries for a suitable vessel for Lucifer. Lucifer’s disgust with God’s favorite creatures was apparently warranted – they are a truly flawed and murderous species that can’t seem to learn from their history. No human was apt, resilient… _worthy_. So Azazel thought, if he couldn’t _find_ a vessel strong enough, he would make one.

He began crafting demonic pacts with young individuals, specifically young women. Azazel would give them something they deeply desired – the life of a deceased loved one returned seemed quite prevalent – and he asked for a humble favor, a modest wish, in return: that he would be allowed to enter their homes exactly ten years from when they made the bargain. Of course, he promised no harm would come to them. As long as they didn’t interfere with his business. But what they didn’t know was that with entry to their home, he would gain entry to their nursery.

As it turns out, nearly all of them interfered. As per the contract, they could not be allowed to live. No matter, however, as he served his purpose with each visit: spilling his blood into the mouths of the babes. The six month old infants tasted his blood for the first time, setting them on course for a very important future.

Azazel couldn’t return topside as often as he’d like to watch over his beloved creations. He was needed in Hell, to see to the day to day operations. To learn of the Seals. To find out how to free Lilith. So he enlisted his own children to go above and watch over the pièce de résistance of Lucifer’s orders. They each dedicated half a decade of their lives in Earth years, out of duty, out of loyalty, and because it’s gotten harder and harder to find a good place to pop in and out of Hell from, thanks to the increasing amount of Devil’s Gates those dastardly hunters made over the last two centuries.

His children are due to return soon. Rangda, Azazel’s favorite, is first to arrive. Her assigned children are Ava Wilson, Andrew Gallagher, and Sam Winchester. She’s delighted to report how well composed the children are, each with some budding hint of darkness that no ten year old child should know how to access yet. Rangda was smart enough to get just close enough to their lives to groom them down the path Azazel desires. Even though Azazel scolds her mildly and warns her to be careful, he definitely is very proud of his only daughter.

Barbatos and Naberus appear with tales of inadequate children that lack ascendancy. They expected more from children with demon blood in their veins. Azazel tells them to take a leaf out of their sister’s book, and curtly dismisses them.

“What of John Winchester?” Azazel asks when he and his daughter are alone. He had Rangda keep an eye out for the father of one of his most promising creations as well. 

Following the death of his wife by Azazel’s hand, John Winchester became a hunter with plans to pursue and kill Azazel himself. John Winchester’s hunt has been active for nearly ten years, 100 years to Azazel, and he’s hardly any closer to the truth than when he started. The sorry fool doesn’t even believe demons truly exist, despite the exorcisms he’s seen and the hellhounds Azazel sent after him.

“He learns something new each day, but he couldn’t be farther from the truth,” Rangda responds crossly. “I don’t understand why you waste your efforts on him.”

“What was the quote from that delightful crime movie Barbatos once mentioned?” Azazel ponders. “Oh, right. ‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer’.”

Impatiently, Rangda responds, “Those were Sun Tzu’s words, Father. You should know. You bartered Yang-Wang-Yeh for his soul.”

“Ah, yes. Sun Tzu. Fantastic military strategist. He would have been a true asset to our cause.” Azazel pauses. “Living topside hasn’t given you a sense of humor, I see.”

“We’re demons,” she responds flatly. Then, she falters. “There is one thing, Father…about the Winchesters.” Her comment is met by silence, so she goes on. “John Winchester has a friend, a teacher of sorts. A fellow hunter, Mark Cooper. A few years prior, they came across a nest of succubi.” She stops to seethe for a moment, muttering, “Filthy whores, giving demons a bad name–”

“Rangda,” Azazel chides.

“The succubi told them how Hell has plans for the Winchesters. That they’re pawns in a game so large he can’t fathom the size.”

“How did the hunters receive this information?”

“Mark Cooper seemed to take more interest than John Winchester. He easily believed the succubi, tried to question them further. Winchester was more focused on the succubus that transformed into his dead wife.”

“And the nest?”

“Gone. Succubi may be demons, but they come from human origins. There isn’t much that won’t kill them.”

“Hmm. Yet John Winchester still doesn’t believe in us.”

“Do you want him to, Father? Wouldn’t that make his hunt more zealous?”

Azazel doesn’t respond.

“Father…are you afraid? Are you afraid that Mark Cooper will lead John Winchester straight to you?”

“Of course not, child. Every hunter in the world could know without a doubt that we exist, but they will never find _me.”_

“Yes, Father.”

“You’ve done good work, Rangda.”

“Thank you, Father.”

When Azazel is alone on the throne once more, the surrounding flames rapidly heighten and blaze with intense heat until they explode, smoldering back into the normal incandescence. Pathetic John Winchester. So consumed by revenge, so blind to the mysteries of the world, to the many options so close to his disposal. Now, Mark Cooper, that’s a smart man, a smart hunter….But he has no need for such a tool. No vendetta to lay to rest. John Winchester, however…once he knows he’s hunting a demon, he’ll look for a way to _kill_ that demon. And that’s when Azazel can make his move.

Luring John Winchester into the succubi nest was simple. Mark Cooper was something Azazel hadn’t anticipated, though. If John Winchester had been alone, he’d have all the information he needed to go after demons. Maybe it’s time to increase the risk. Put something else John Winchester loves at stake. Rangda mentioned how John Winchester’s affection varies greatly from one son to another. Azazel would never intentionally put Sam Winchester, _his_ special child, at risk, but he is the son most likely to spark another crusade. It just might take Azazel a few decades to work it out.

¨ ¨ ¨

Dad and I left the Roadhouse yesterday evening after Dad got a hold of John. He’s been in Athens, Georgia with the boys and agreed to meet us in Little Rock, Arkansas in two days. We made it across the border into Kansas before we called it quits and found a motel.

We’re back on the road in the early morning. Dad decides to quiz me on Kansas songs and trivia, since we’re in the state. After we jam out to _Point of Know Return_ , from the same titled album, he informs me of a fun fact before starting the real test.

“Like a lot of bands, these guys started out playing bars,” Dad says. I nod. “The majority of their gigs wouldn’t let them play original songs, only covers. And they _hated_ playing covers. Eventually the band got wise, played their original material, and said they were new songs from the Allman Brothers.”

“Are you serious? That’s hilarious.”

“It’s very hilarious. All right, here’s a tricky one for you. Before the release of their first album, Kansas added a new member and changed their name. Who was the member, and what was the band name?”

I lean my head back against the seat and groan. “Um…Okay, well, I know they were unofficially called White Clover for a bit.”

“Good. And the band member?”

“I invoke a question. What instrument did he play?”

“Violin.”

“Hmm. Wait, didn’t the dude who played violin do backup vocals for Walsh?”

“Are you invoking your second question?”

“No,” I say hastily. I can’t waste it on that. “Oh, it was Steinhardt!”

Dad chuckles. “Very good. It took you too long, though.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I grumble. “Hey, you hear that?” I reach forward and spin the volume dial to the left, allowing us to hear a phone ring.

“Sharp ears, Lee,” Dad says as he digs his phone out of his pocket. “Hello?...Oh, hi, Ellen.”

Ellen? We hardly hear from Ellen outside of the Roadhouse. Hmm. I pull out my dad’s journal and browse through the pages while he talks.

“It was David? Are you sure that’s what he said?” Dad says into the phone. I glance at him. He sounds worried. “No, it’s okay. I’ll let him know when I see him. Thanks, Ellen.”

“What’s up, Dad?” I ask.

He sighs heavily before answering. “Rowen David. Have I told you about him?”

“No.”

“He used to be a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Started out teaching psychology, branched out into parapsychology, and then lost his tenure when he started teaching his students about demonology, occultism, and the historical social concept of the Devil. Since then he’s been hunting demons, and he’s one of the best.”

“Okay, so what happened?”

“Ellen says David called to tell her that he exorcised a demon that knew a little too much about the Winchesters. The demon was stalking them, and it had quite an interest in Sam.”

I frown. “Sam? Why?”

“Remember that deer hunting trip John and I took you and Dean on when you two were twelve?”

“Yeah, sort of. I remember it wasn’t deer season.”

“Do you remember Sam showing up out of nowhere?”

I stop and think for a moment. “Kind of…how the hell did he get there?”

“He hitched a ride with a man named Anderson. That man was a hunter, and he was hunting Sam.”

“Are you _kidding_ me?” I say, my voice rising a few octaves. “He was just a kid!”

“I know, Harley, listen. After the hunting trip, Bobby told John that his friend Silas, a soothsayer, wanted to talk to Sam, said Sam was special. John took his boy to the soothsayer, and Silas asked to speak to Sam alone. John reluctantly let him.”

“John went back an hour later. Sam was sitting on the porch, playing with a ladybug he found in the grass. Silas wasn’t around, so John went inside…” Dad pauses, takes a breath. Nothing gets to him, so what was so wrong? “John said he hadn’t seen anything like it since his time in Vietnam. Blood everywhere, Silas left in bits and pieces, and the words _KILL HIM_ written in blood on the kitchen cabinets.”

“Did John think Sam…?” I can’t even finish my sentence.

“There’s no way in hell an eight year old boy could do something like that. Anderson revealed himself to John after Silas was killed. He said he was following the Winchesters, keeping tabs on Sam, and _insisted_ that Sam killed Silas. According to Anderson, Sam was dangerous and needed to be stopped.”

“That’s completely stupid. What did John do?”

Dad stares out of the windshield for a long time. “John hunted him. And Dean killed him.”

My eyes bug out so much I think they’ll leap from the sockets. Dean killed a human? At twelve years old? Why didn’t he tell me? Why didn’t my dad ever tell me? The lives of the Coopers were never as…burdensome…as the Winchesters’. I mean, we had our troubles in the past, when I was younger. Before we hit the road. But never to the degree of John’s.

“I think I remember some of that,” I say. “Not specifics. But I remember you and John and Bobby talking at Bobby’s house. All secretive. You and John took us to Michigan after that. Never stayed in one place for longer than a couple of weeks. Stopped letting Dean or I hunt for a long time. What does this have to do with the demon David exorcised, though?”

“First, a hunter trails Sam, says he’s is dangerous and needs to be killed. Now a _demon_ is doing the same thing? The demon knew everything about John Winchester. It knew I was working with him. It knew about Dean and Sam and you. It basically told David John’s life story since his wife was killed. The demon revealed no motive, no purpose, but it had been very interested in Sam for quite some years.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” I can’t pretend to know much about demons. I didn’t think they were real until last year, when I saw my first exorcism. There was a chance they existed, I mean, how could there not be? Bobby always said they were real, but they’re rare. Only a handful of sightings a year. There’s plenty of stories, plenty of exorcisms, but demons aren’t the only things that can be rid of by exorcism. So just because there’s an exorcism doesn’t mean it’s a demon. “But why Sam?” I persist. “He’s a normal kid. Smart, not really fond of hunting. Why is a demon so interested in him?”

“That’s the million dollar question, Harley.”

“We need to get to John.”

“And fast.” Dad steps on the gas pedal, and the Camaro roars into acceleration.

At sundown, we reach Little Rock. After we find dinner, we head to a bar with outdoor tables and wait for John and the boys. I’m eager to see them, it’s been a while. And I just need to see Sam again as soon as possible to know that this whole demon ordeal is completely insane. One look at his boyish face and I’ll know, he’s no killer, he’s no threat.

I hear the Impala’s engine roar from the parking lot. There’s not many cars that can make that gorgeous rumble nowadays. My dad’s car, a yellow 1971 Camaro, sounds beautiful, but it’s a more hollow grumble, not quite as loud.

To my dismay, John shows up alone, having stashed his boys somewhere so secret he won’t even tell Dad. And he usually tells my dad _everything_. He’s worried about something for sure. I bet Dean’s not liking the lockdown too much. John looks a little weathered but seems genuinely relieved to see my dad. It doesn’t last long, though.

“We need to talk, John.”

John stares at my dad for a long moment. “Am I gonna need a drink for this conversation?”

“Make it a double.”

When John returns with a round for the table, Dad immediately jumps into the story of Rowen David and the demon. With each word, John’s intensity grows, his eyes narrow, he tilts his head slightly as if working through things as he listens.

“When you said you wanted to meet, Mark, I didn’t expect this. You didn’t mention it on the phone.”

“It’s not something that should be said on the phone. And I didn’t find out until after we spoke.”

John shakes his head. “Demons. It’s insane to think about.”

“Is it though?” Dad says. “Bobby always insisted they were real. Always called you an idjit for not believing, even after watching multiple exorcisms.”

“He also said that there hasn’t been a demon that’s actually laid eyes on the Devil. Even the _demons_ don’t think he exists.”

Dad shrugs offhandedly. “But they say Hell exists.” John gives my dad a look that clearly says he’s trying very hard not to roll his eyes. “David says demons are a lot like us where belief is concerned. Just like humans are with God, demons are like that with the Devil. You have to see it to believe it.” In John’s brooding silence, my dad goes on. “There’s plenty of proof out there, even if we haven’t experienced all of it. David wouldn’t lie, he knows his stuff.”

With an annoyed grunt, John drains his drink. “I know that. I know they’re real.”

 _Huh, interesting_ , I think as I make a face into my glass.He’s been anti-demon since I was a kid. 

“I exorcised a demon a couple months back,” John continues.

I spit and choke on my drink. John and my dad stare at me. Sheepishly, I wipe my mouth. “Sorry,” I mutter.

“The demon?” Dad pressures John.

“It was inhabiting an old woman, and it knew something about the succubi nest.”

Dad’s eyes widen. “John–”

“Look, Mark, I know. I’ve been worried. Almost paranoid about the whole situation. But it’s no coincidence about all this demon stuff.”

“You have every reason to be worried,” Dad says. “You just need to keep your guard up. I’m here to help you, but you’ve got to talk to me.”

“I know,” John says again, defeatedly. “It just doesn’t make any sense. For years there hasn’t been hide nor hair of anything seriously demonic. Just the usual scattered sightings Bobby insisted on. Maybe some succubi interference, but come on, let’s face it. They’re succubi.”

I chuckle. A succubus, and their male counterpart, incubus, are basically the half breed demon children of Lilith, the first human to become a demon. For being Lilith is extremely powerful and only outranked in Hell by Satan himself, according to lore, it’s funny that her children turned out to be no more than demonic nymphomaniacs.

“When did you come across a succubi other than the nest?” Dad asks John.

“Remember Sam’s sixth grade teacher? Ms. Lyle?”

After a moment, recognition sparks on my dad’s face. “Holy shit. I’d almost forgotten.”

“What happened?” I ask involuntarily. It’s hard to not ask questions. But I’m sitting at the adult table, so why can’t I know?

“It’s, uh, it’s not good,” John says. “I hadn’t been a hunter for long, I didn’t know what signs to look for. I should have, though, that’s always my excuse.”

“John,” Dad says gently.

“What, Mark? It is. I let that… _thing_ …get to me. Seduce me. It got me to trust it, let my guard down, all to get to Sam. But then–”

John shuts up as a waitress arrives to ask for drink orders. We all get another round.

“But then what?” I ask when she leaves.

“Ms. Lyle, the succubi, kidnapped Sam after school. It put Sam in some sort of trance, like he was under a spell, and he became compliant. Dean let me know what happened as soon as he could, and did the smart thing by calling Mark as well, and we tracked down Ms. Lyle. It said…that it wanted Sam for something. That he was special, that he has something it wants.” John sighs sadly.

“Sounds like Silas and Anderson, huh?” I say. John nods his head curtly, then turns to stare inside the bar until the waitress returns. But me, I get this thought about Silas. He was a soothsayer. He would have access to the other side, technically. He would have information John should have trusted, taken to heart.

With fresh drinks, we continue our conversation.

“We should find Rowen David,” John says. “I haven’t met him. Maybe there’s a reason all these dots are connected. A reason we can’t see.”

Dad nods in acknowledgement. “We _have_ had more run-ins with demons or demon-like creatures than I’d like to admit.”

A lightbulb goes off in my brain. I raise my eyebrows, purse my lips, but neither John nor my dad made the click. I speak quickly, as if I’m afraid I won’t get another chance to say this. “Sorry to interrupt, but, uh, the only types of creatures that have been so freaking interested in John and his family all this time have Hell as the common denominator. Maybe they’re getting their information from Hell? Maybe this has to do with–”

“Mary.” John takes the word from my mouth, and it looks like it hurts him terribly just to say her name. “This all has to be connected to Mary. Sam is her son. She died in his nursery.”

“What if the thing that killed her is a demon?” Dad suggests darkly.

John clenches his jaw, his face turns red. Slowly, his hands ball into fists, then suddenly he strikes out to bash the tabletop. “Dammit, Mark! Why didn’t I see this before? Why did it take me so goddamn long?”

“John, you were trying to learn to be a hunter while hunting something in you didn’t know was in the major leagues. There was no way you could have put it together. Hell, even _I_ didn’t put it together. But now we did, and now we can figure out what to do about it.”

Seething, John takes up his glass and drains it. Once empty, he stares angrily into the bottom of it. When he looks up, there’s murder in his tired eyes. “We’ve got work to do.”

¨ ¨ ¨

After Azazel’s most recent plot went from fully operational to one Hell of a calamity, forgive the pun, he decided he definitely needed to question the competency of his elitist demons. The plan, in which he spent years devising but was ruined in a matter of hours, took a nosedive in the year 1994 on Earth. But Azazel had to wait centuries in Hell before he received word of the failure.

Pithius, such a fine demon. Not as capable as his own children, of course, but then Azazel couldn’t risk _them_. The plan was simple: possess Sam Winchester’s grade school teacher, seduce John Winchester over a matter of months to gain his favor, and then kidnap the child.

When the boy went missing, his father would surely kick it into high gear and quickly hunt Pithius down. John Winchester would find out demons truly exist and that demons are contentedly responsible for the misfortune in his life. When the man discovers that Azazel, if not just a regular demon, was responsible for killing his wife, he wouldn’t settle for a simple exorcism. No, his vengeance, his desire for revenge, is too great. He would want to find a way to wipe that demon from existence. And there is only one thing on Earth that can do that.

Hunters think it’s a legend. Azazel himself is tempted to believe the same, since his army fails time and again to discover the weapon. For over a century, however, hunters continue to look past what the weapon truly is and focus more on its’ most favorable feature: killing _anything_. But the weapon is a key to unlock the Devil’s Gate holding Lilith in Hell, and that’s what Azazel needs it for.

Azazel would have been one step closer to finding the weapon if it wasn’t for Pithius. Granted, he got everything right until the end. Inhabited the young schoolteacher, took an interest in Sam Winchester, praised the boy on his incredible talents, found reasons for continued conversation with John Winchester. Conversations that led to meetings beyond school, beyond his son. And soon she was in his bed. 

When the time came to take the child, Pithius was flawless. But that reprehensible older Winchester boy not only called his father, but Mark Cooper as well. With both hunters on his tail, Pithius had to rethink his actions. He was sure to get himself sent back to Hell for a long time if things went wrong.

Things did go wrong. Mark Cooper suspected a demon all along, but John Winchester insisted it was just a succubi, there to steal his child like it is in their nature. Mark Cooper trapped Pithius in a pathetically infuriating Devil’s Trap. Both men argued over which way to end Pithius. Exorcism, or a plain old Columbian necktie. Such a fantastic phrase. Barbatos told Azazel all about the various innovative ways humans create to kill each other – and some of them find the act enjoyable. Always entertaining. Some of them even spark ideas for torture in Hell.

It came time for Mark Cooper to put his foot down and start the exorcism. Rather than going through with the plan, Pithius forever branded himself a coward and left the schoolteacher’s body. Rangda, who had been back on patrol of the boy, listened to the hunters quarrel about the existence of demons, the unknown powers of succubi, how best to keep their children safe. Rangda was rather disgusted by the latter quarrel.

Once the Winchesters and Mark Cooper were on their way, Rangda tracked down Pithius. He would possess a new human each day and kept on the move. It took her some time, but a daughter of Azazel would never fail him. She dragged Pithius back to Hell and presented him to Azazel, and watched gleefully as Azazel smote him from existence.

It wasn’t Azazel’s intention to demolish a once-fine soldier. There are a plethora of cages and torture chambers within the depths of hell, and plenty of hellhounds to sic on an escaped prisoner. That _was_ the original intent – infinite confinement. But he let his anger get the best of him and alas, Pithius was no more.

Azazel’s anger festers to this day. It shouldn’t be so _fucking hard_ to convince a hunter that demons exist. But just like Azazel knows that Sam Winchester is a top contender, if not his _favorite_ , he knows the boy’s father is the only one capable of finding what Azazel needs. John Winchester possesses the determination, the motivation, to keep after his wife’s killer decades after her death. That kind of drive is the only thing that can reveal the weapon.

At the local demon watering hole not far from the throne, Azazel’s subordinates discuss the latest news from above. For the first time in centuries, two hunters took a sudden desperate interest in demons. They research, they experiment, they speak to humans pathetic enough to call themselves demon experts. But the most interesting thing about the whole situation iswhy the hunters became so obsessed. They want to learn how to _kill_ a demon! How pathetic, how absolutely unfathomably ridiculous!

It was a joke. It had to be. There’s no way to kill a demon. If they killed the meatsuit they choose to wear, fine. The demon can find another one. The ultimate goal is to not be exorcised. If they were, they’d experience excruciating pain until they were sent back to Hell. Most demons don’t want that. If they were smart or lucky enough to escape the fiery pits once, they tried to stay topside as long as possible. Higher tier demons go back and forth when they can, but that’s because they’re mainly committing the torture of lesser demons rather than receiving it. They have reason to return. Not to mention that escaping Hell to go topside nowadays is no easy feat, even for a demon as high-ranking as Azazel.

 _But Azazel is the target_ , one demon points out.

 _That means nothing_ , another says. _Azazel is too smart and powerful to fall into whatever trap these pitiful humans attempt to lay for him._

_Not to mention that the humans don’t know Azazel is the one they’re searching for. They aren’t looking for a particular demon. Not yet. Just a possible means to an end._

_Should we inform the Prince?_

_Inform him of what? That two despicable mortals began a worthless quest to find a way to kill a demon they’ve no apprehensible idea exists?_

_One hunter appears to be more obsessed with the pursuit of knowledge than the other, though. He could become a problem if he learns too much._

The demons agree to keep an eye on this hunter, because as much as they believe killing a demon isn’t real, they aren’t stupid enough to ignore a possible threat.

At his throne, Azazel finds the demons’ conversation amusing. How little they know, how unimaginative they are. None of this would be happening if it weren’t for Azazel. It’s come time to start the next phase. He summons his children.

He assigns Barbatos the task of trailing Mark Cooper. Naberus has John Winchester. Azazel instructs them to follow the hunters, watch from afar but never let them out of their sight. It was up to their discretion when something was worth informing Azazel of immediately, but only then could they leave their post and return to Hell. Allowing a bit of fear for making the wrong decision made for proper judgement calls in what they deemed important.

Once Barbatos and Naberus are dismissed, he addresses Rangda. As he expected, she isn’t pleased.

“I’m more than qualified to keep tabs on either of the hunters,” she says irritably.

“Daughter, please. They are doing nothing more than glorified babysitting. I have a much more important mission for you.” 

Intrigued, Rangda waits patiently.

“You are to track down and keep tabs on Mark Cooper and John Winchester’s family and friends. I want to know everyone they’ve ever spoken to, anyone they’ve asked to borrow a book from, anyone who has had contact with them in any way. Observe, learn, think – but don’t act. Information is the root of all power. You’ll never know what leverage these people may give us, what lengths Mark Cooper or John Winchester will go to have their lives spared.”

“I understand, Father,” Rangda says delightedly. “I won’t disappoint you.”

That, Azazel was sure of.

¨ ¨ ¨

It’s a huge relief to take a step in the right direction for once. Even though it wasn’t my crusade, nor my dad’s, it sure felt like it was since we were present for nearly the entire journey. I wasn’t involved as much until I was older. Dad, however, made it his life’s mission to help John. Teach him to be a hunter, find the thing that killed his wife. Now they’re closer than ever.

There was no way the Coopers and Winchesters could travel together now, though. We split up to cover more ground, and John and Dad check in at least once a day, if not more, as we hunt this son of a bitch.

A demon. Holy shit. An actual _demon_ put a target on the Winchester family. And we aren’t looking for your garden variety mini-devil here, either. They had to have enough juice to produce fire from nothing and inflict physical wounds without touching someone. Not to mention the telekinesis and teleportation. It’s no wonder John and Dad had such a hard time the last couple decades. But they didn’t have a great advantage then that we do now: a glorious little tool called the internet.

So. Demons. We’ve consulted Rowen David, of course, but the only demons he knows of with telekinesis, biological manipulation, teleportation, and pyrokinesis are ones _way_ up the demon food chain. Meaning, ones that reside in Hell almost permanently.

At least we’re halfway towards the _who_. What we don’t have is the _how_ …how are we going to _kill_ a goddamn demon? Because, you know, banishing it to Hell isn’t enough for John. He’s got to toast the sucker so it never returns. Which I understand…but that was _before_ it was a _god.damned.demon._

Afraid? Of course I’m not afraid. I’m…sensible. But whatever. It’s not my choice.

 _To Kill a Demon: The Do’s and Don’ts of Demon Slaying._ The title of my next book. Because if anyone can do it, we can (look at that, sensible _and_ optimistic).

Rowen David was the first person my dad and I turned to once we broke off from John. He knows of all the ways to weaken a demon, but not kill it. The purpose of demon encounters is to save the vessel they’re inhabiting. It’s about sparing the human inside. But killing the vessel isn’t enough to kill the demon, either. And no one has ever tried to kill a demon before.

In light of that, David told us a story.

In the nineteenth century, during the time Halley’s Comet was visible in the sky, a hunter named Samuel Colt crafted a revolver with 13 bullets. This gun could kill anything, from a regular deer to a deity, but you wouldn’t want to waste it on a slab of venison. The bullets were special, as they were the only bullets that could fit the revolver. Once the bullets were gone, the gun was useless. But until that point, it was a gun beyond a hunter’s wildest dreams.

David imbued hope in us the way Samuel Colt somehow imbued the gun with the power to kill supernatural creatures. Only David snatched the hope right back when he said no one knows if the gun exists or where it could be now. It’s a legend, a fairy tale.

But I keep thinking of the gun, cleverly named the Colt, as the days and weeks go on. By summer I couldn’t care less if Morton called me about those Nix in South Dakota. I’m determined to find that gun.

Dad stresses the importance of continuing to hunt like normal as we also help John. Even though John is my dad’s best friend, he believes the dark path John’s been on since 1984 is only going to get darker. And he’s taking his boys down with him. Dad admits to not providing me with the best life since _our_ dark path started in 1986, but he always put me before the job, and he can’t say the same about John.

It’s June 23rd, almost sundown. I’ve been lounging all day by the pool at a hotel in Tucson, and I have no plans to move until closing time. The warm breeze becomes soothing as the sun goes down. But then I remember the humid breeze I felt yesterday in the desert that turned out to be a Huay Chivo breathing down my neck and I shudder.

A Huay Chivo is basically what would happen if a Chupacabra and a minotaur had a disgusting love child. Part human, part goat, usually has horns, always has red eyes. Huay Chivo, from the Mayan legend, translates loosely to “witch goat”. Basically, an evil witch shapeshifts into that red-eyed goat form at night to feed on livestock and human souls.

The legends are broken and hard to understand. There’s no definitive way to kill a Huay Chivo, but fire is mentioned a lot. We planned to burn it alive.

Dad and I tracked the Huay Chivo from the Mexican border to Green Canyon, Arizona, but at the North Rim trailhead, it basically came to us. Except I unknowingly turned out to be the bait. Despite that, the hunt was ultimately successful and I decided I needed a day by the pool to recover.

I stare at the darkening sky growing purple by the minute and think of the Colt again, and how much easier it would’ve been to kill that Huay Chivo if I had it. Why wouldn’t Samuel Colt make more guns? Or more bullets? I know 13 is supposed to be symbolic. In numerology, 13 is associated with producing tangible outcomes in the material world. In the Major Arcana of the Tarot, the 13th card is Death. It’s also considered an unlucky number to most people, except the Freemasons. The original American flag and the seal on the one dollar bill each have 13 stars, because the Freemasons thought it was lucky. But what does that mean for the Colt?

Above me, a shooting star flies across the sky. I grin, and start to make a wish, but then the wish escapes me. What do I wish for? What do I want? The Colt, yes, but what about the bigger picture? What do _I_ desire?

Oh well, the star is gone as fast as it appeared. David said Halley’s Comet was overhead when Samuel Colt made the gun. Does that mean anything? Is that how the gun got its power? How long does a comet take to pass overhead, anyway?

Time to consult the trusty ol’ internet.

Halley’s Comet appeared in 1835 and moves in a 75 year orbit. The only known short-period comet that can be seen from the naked-eye and appear twice in a single human lifetime (like Mark Twain). Interesting. Doesn’t really help me, though.

In an article by a Professor Frederic Campbell, he wrote that the comet appeared in the eastern sky just after sunset, headed north, and was visible for over an entire _month_ , the comet was that long. That means Samuel Colt made the gun in the span of a month. That’s more than enough time to make a single revolver and 13 magical bullets, especially when Colt was on the way to becoming an established gunmaker. He even had a patent going for his guns.

Now, _where_ did he make the gun? Samuel Colt was born in Connecticut. Professor Campbell wrote that article from his home in Virginia, and the comet was traveling north. I’m no astronomer, but I’d say the comet went towards Canada rather than California. So Colt was on the East Coast somewhere. Noted.

Well, now, here’s something. Halley’s Comet was in the sky in October 1835. It was at perihelion (closest to the sun) on October 16th. I jot that down in my dad’s journal as well, in case it’s significant later. But if the _comet_ is how the Colt its power, the time of the year would be important as well.

New internet search.

Moon phases in October 1835. Nothing jumps out at me. Numerology. October was originally the eighth month of the year. Eight is a symbol of prosperity, wealth, peace, and fertility. Farmers reap their harvest. The Chinese paired the number with the planet Uranus and spoke of its persisting strength and recognition to seize opportunities for success. Huh.

I’m getting nowhere. I wonder if Bobby would know anything. He usually knows everything. Couldn’t hurt to give him a call.

“Hey, Bobby,” I say brightly when he answers the phone.

Incoherent grumbling returns through the speaker. _“D’you have any idea what time it is?”_

I check my watch and make a face. “Nine forty-five at night.”

Silence. Then a defeated, _“Oh.”_

“Bobby, it’s a little early to be so wasted.”

_“It’s five-o’clock somewhere.”_

“That’s not…okay, whatever. What can you tell me about Samuel Colt and his gun?”

Bobby seems to sober up. _“Hmm. So you’ve stumbled upon the tale, huh?”_

“Rowen David told my dad and I about it and it’s been on my mind.”

_“Samuel Colt is a legend among hunters. He did his due diligence to keep demons at bay by buildin’ a Devil’s Gate in the center of a 100-mile Devil’s Trap.”_

“Whoa, seriously? Hang on.” I hurriedly scribble notes on my Colt page. “Where was this Devil’s Gate?”

_“Wyoming. It’s said he built five churches connected by iron railroad tracks with the Devil’s Gate in the center, so no demon could pass to open the Gate. It's like a giant Satanic roach motel.”_

“Holy crap, that’s brilliant. Did he ever have kids? Because he’s got some genius on him that should have been passed down.”

_“Not that I know of,”_ Bobby says tiredly. “ _What do you wanna know, Harley?”_

“Where did Samuel Colt live? Where did he make the gun? Why did he make it during the passing of Halley’s Comet? Is that important? Is that where it got its power? Is that–”

_“Hold on to your hat, kid,”_ Bobby scolds me. _“No one knows_ that _much about Colt and his gun.”_

“If he’s such a legend then why wasn’t this information talked about through the years?”

_“Your guess is as good as mine.”_

“Come on, Bobby. You don’t have some book hidden away with the answers to all my problems?”

Bobby sighs. _“Colt was a blacksmith. He supposedly made a magical gun. It wouldn’t be the first time a blacksmith or metalworker tinkered with the occult. Western Africa, Corybantes, Dactyls, Norse myths all see them as priests or magicians. There’s a German tradition that the blacksmith ends his work on a Saturday by striking his anvil, chaining the Devil for another week.”_

“ _Striking anvil…chain devil another week,”_ I mutter as I write. “But where would Colt get his power? I think the comet is the key. It was overhead in October. I tried looking at significant dates during the months, moon phases, numerology–”

_“Halloween,”_ Bobby says darkly.

“Well, yeah, that too.”

_“Hang on.”_

I wait impatiently while Bobby leaves me on hold. When he finally returns, he says, _“Samuel Colt made the gun in Paterson, New Jersey on Halloween night. That’s all I know.”_

“Good enough. Thank you, Bobby.”

I hang up the phone and jot down some notes in the journal. Then I get ready for bed and have the best sleep I’ve had in weeks.

Dad and I get a few good hunts in over the next two months. We’ve hit a wall in terms of demon hunting and John seems to be taking the stalemate pretty hard. Lots of late nights with Jim Beam. My dad’s had to talk John down from a few interesting ledges.

One drunken night, he asked Dad if he knew any good psychics, because he wanted to hold a séance to try to contact Mary. The next night, he asked Dad to help him put together a summoning box so he could call on a crossroads demon. What was curious about that was, he was only going to make a deal so he could talk to Mary. Not to have her back, not for the demon that killed her. Just to speak to her.

After a week of silence, in which I realized after that John was doing his homework, Sam calls my dad to tell him John’s been researching voodoo and was looking for a houngan. A magician-priest who can divine and do séances and dark magic. Once again, Dad talked John down.

Currently we’re on another quest to find the fabled Colt, at my insistence. I’ve scoured every book, read every internet article, talked to everyone in my dad’s journal, and collected information on Samuel Colt and the gun, whether they be made up or not. 

My first lead was from a friend, Sarah Carter. She said her mom once told her that Samuel Colt made the gun for a hunter who was trying to kill God. I wrote down the information just in case, and it was good to do so instead of writing it off as crazy because I then found an internet site about famous guns. Samuel Colt’s revolver was there.

Underneath a picture of a Paterson (with the caption “Not an exact replica”) was a short passage: _“Handcrafted under the stars, with the Comet watching overhead, the Colt became a supernatural legend made by the famous gun maker, Samuel Colt. Partnered with 13 special bullets, Samuel Colt crafted an almost magical weapon for a fellow hunter in 1835. After the revolver was spent six times, it disappeared from the Earth.”_

Dad’s friend Caleb Buckner mentioned descriptions of the Colt, and it always sounds like a Paterson. But that can’t be. Paterson’s fired cap-and-ball at the time, and if Colt made 13 bullets – which I found out were each supposedly engraved with a number – they had to have been cartridges. But Colt didn’t introduce cartridges into the Colt lineup until 1843. So was _the_ Colt a special prototype? It’d be one hell of a prototype if it was.

Jack Winston, my ex…lover, I guess you’d call him, said that he’d been in Sunrise, Wyoming on a case and found an old saloon with a memorial for Samuel Colt. He had asked around, curious, and found out that the locals think Samuel Colt made the gun for himself instead of another hunter because it was spotted in 1845 in his possession at that very bar. They said he bestowed it upon an unknown friend before he died.

After that last tidbit, my dad went quiet for a few moments. Then he asked if I’d like to see the Rocky Mountains. I said yes, very hesitantly, because I knew there had to be a bigger picture and he was only giving me a couple of pixels.

The Camaro grumbles gloriously down the highway as we make our way northwest to Colorado. It doesn’t take long before the conversation switches to music. First, some clever, random, or funny fact about our favorite bands. And then the tests.

“Let’s see what you remember about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” Dad says with a mischievous grin.

“Bring it on, old man,” I retort with a smile.

“Who was the only female artist inducted into the Hall of Fame as both a solo artist and part of a band?” *****

“Stevie Nicks, Dad, come on,” I say instantly. “You underestimate my talent. And my love for Fleetwood Mac.”

Dad glares at me before rolling his eyes lightheartedly. “All right, Einstein. If you’re so smart, riddle me this: Who was the only artist to be inducted _three_ times, and name the years and band names accordingly.”

My mocking sneer morphs slowly into a smile, but only because I’m hiding the fact that I do _not_ know the answer to this question. Or at least, the entire answer. It’s obviously Eric Clapton, but I don’t know that first band name.

“Clock’s a-tickin’, Lee,” Dad jokes.

“Okay, okay. Sheesh. Eric Clapton.”

“Good. Go on.”

“Uh, okay…inducted in 2000 as a solo artist, in 1993 as part of Cream, and the year prior as part of…” My voice trails off. I was hoping the answer would sort of just come to me as I spoke. I guess not. I stare out of the window looking for inspiration. Nothing. I listen to the song on the radio. Lynyrd Skynyrd, _Free Bird_. I love that song, the melancholy tune, the sad hopefulness. Until it gets to the end, where the tune speeds up. It doesn’t fit the song.

Holy crap on a cracker. Bird. Free bird. I know the band!

“It’s the frickin’ Yardbirds!” I exclaim gleefully. “Damn, I hate that band. No wonder I pushed the name from my mind.”

“Good job, Harley. Soon you’ll know more than me,” Dad says proudly.

“Yeah, I doubt that.” But still, the thought is nice.

The Rockies are coming in hot. We should be there in the next hour or so. Only when a turn comes up that should take us in their direction, Dad goes the opposite way. Ah, the big picture reveals itself.

“You think Daniel Elkins has the Colt, don’t you?” I ask.

“No. I think he knows about it. I think he knows for sure if it’s real or not.”

“How? Did you speak to him?”

“He doesn’t believe in phones. Thinks it’s a way to be traced and tracked. That’s why we’re going to see him in person.”

“So if you didn’t talk to him, how do you know?”

Dad shrugs. “Call it a really good hunch. Elkins’ family is from Sunrise, Wyoming.”

“Like the bar Jack told me about.” I wiggle my eyebrows. “Was Elkins’ ancestor friends with Samuel Colt? Do you think Colt gave the gun to an Elkins from the 19th century?”

“One step at a time, Harley. We need to know if the gun is absolutely real or not. If it is, then all the details come later.”

I grip the edges of my seat and sit up straight. “I know, but this could be it. I’ve been searching the better part of half the year for this damn gun, and I still don’t know if it exists for sure. Now we’ll know if it’s just a fairy tale or not.”

Dad smirks sideways at me, then returns his eyes to the road.

Daniel Elkins’ cabin is buried deep in the woods of Manning, Colorado. Being early September, the drive up in an American muscle car wasn’t that hard due to the absence of snow. But while I pictured a small, one room cabin filled with stuffed deer’s heads, maybe an outhouse, we come across a decent sized lodge with lights in the windowpanes and a pair of rocking chairs on the porch. It’s definitely seen better days, though.

The man on the porch is a bit mousier than I remember, and somewhat jumpy, which surprises me because he’s well known for being the best vampire hunter out there.

Elkins greets us from one of the rocking chairs. “That you, Cooper?”

“It is,” Dad says.

“Damn, you got old.”

“So did you.”

Elkins stares with a dead expression. Dad stares right back. Then they suddenly chuckle loudly and embrace. After, Dad guides me forward.

“You remember my daughter, Harley?”

“Aye. What a fine young lady.”

I try not to blush.

“What brings you to this neck of the woods, Mark?” Elkins asks. “Vampires, I hope?”

Dad glances around, his eyes darting swiftly from tree to tree. “It’s probably a conversation suitable for indoors.”

Elkins grunts but he gets the hint. Dad and I ascend the steps and follow Elkins and into a well-worn yet cozy front room. There’s definitely signs that a hunter lives here. An impressive display of knives, guns, other hunting equipment. Sacks of salt, books, candles.

Dad doesn’t waste a moment. “I’m here on John’s behalf. We know the thing that murdered his wife is a demon, and we’ve been looking for a way to kill it.”

“You can’t _kill_ a demon,” Elkins says with an exasperated huff. “Just ask David.”

“We have,” Dad says.

I grow edgy real fast. “There’s something out there that can kill a demon, sir, and we’d like to hear about it.”

Elkins, however, can’t seem to figure out if he wants his mouth open or closed. Flabbergasted, he looks from my dad to me and back again before he manages an uneasy chuckle. “It’s just a myth.”

“Sunrise, Wyoming?” I urge.

With a defeated sigh, Elkins falls heavily into a worn out armchair.

“Does it exist?” Dad asks with a tone of impatience.

“Aye, it does. A gun that can kill absolutely anything.”

My face immediately forms into a huge grin. I really feel like shouting out, _I knew it! I knew it was real!_ Dad must sense this because he gives a subtle shake of his head and turns to Elkins.

“Can you tell us about it, Dan? Do you know where it is?”

Elkins glances to the left and back so quickly I almost didn’t notice it. But I did. Does Elkins actually have the gun? Does he have it _here?_

But then Elkins gives a defeated sigh and pinches the bridge of his nose. “You said John wants to kill a demon?”

Dad nods. “That’s right.”

“Why does he want to kill it? Why can’t he just send it back to Hell?”

“He said he wants to make it suffer, make it hurt, for what it did to him and his family. He’s always wanted to do that to whatever it was that killed his wife, but now that we know…well, our options are limited now that it’s a demon.”

“I haven’t seen John in ages. I remember how he was, though.” Elkins clears his through. Adjusts his weight in the chair. Almost like he’s killing time, avoiding our question. “Why didn’t John come here himself?”

“John’s in Missouri, following a lead Harley found.” My dad grins proudly at me. “It’s been mostly her research that got us to this point.”

“Is that so,” Elkins says dully. “Do you know which demon you’re after? Do you know if it’s still here, or back in Hell?”

“No, we don’t. But it’s not for lack of trying. We’ve been after this son of a bitch for a long time, Dan, and we could use your help here.”

Elkins isn’t a complete monster. I can see the sympathy on his face, in his posture. He knows how hard the hunt is. But there’s hesitation as well. Why? Because if hunters knew something like the Colt was real, there would be chaos trying to obtain it? Because if a gun like that truly existed, the knowledge of a hunter might become useless if they could just point and shoot? I can understand that. But this situation is entirely different. And I think Elkins comes to that conclusion himself.

“Wait here.”

Elkins heads to the left, not surprising, and goes through a doorway. Before he closes the door I get a glimpse of a large desk, a stuffed elk’s head on the wall, a large bookshelf. Probably an office. Probably with a safe or hidden passage into the ground or something.

I knew the gun would be an antique, but I wasn’t expecting something so absolutely gorgeous. Elkins returns with a box, an almost auburn color and a little longer than a foot. He carries it protectively, one hand on each end, holding it close to his chest. I almost feel bad that we’ve exposed him and the gun like this.

When Elkins gets closer, the lid shows a heptagram-based sigil etched into the wood. It almost looks like a devil’s trap, but it’s no trap I’ve ever seen. Not that I’ve seen many. But this one stands out because of the tiny scorpion carved in the very center.

I don’t have long to think about the lid because Elkins’ right hand moves gingerly from the side of the box to the front, where he undoes a small latch. Then, in a motion that would seem dramatic if I didn’t know was reluctance, he lifts the lid.

The revolver lies on a bed of felt to match the color of the box. The handle is of a brown wood and has a simple pentagram towards the butt, but it’s not carved with the same precision as the sigil on the lid. The cylinder is darker than the rest of the mechanism, which has small, almost meaningless designs pressed into the metal. I notice a phrase etched on the barrel but it’s too far away to see. I haven’t been able to take a step closer. I feel like I’m in the presence of…well, of something that shouldn’t exist. And not in a “I’m going to hunt you down” way either. Almost…esoteric.

Then there are the cartridges. Each bullet has its own slot, and just like my dad’s friends said, they’re numbered. Only, one through six are missing. The remaining bullets look so lonely.

“I’ve kept this gun safe for nearly forty years,” Elkins says in a gruff, aching voice. “Been in my family for four generations. My great-granddaddy was given the gun by Samuel Colt himself just before he died.”

“I see why you’re so reluctant to part with it,” Dad says gently. “But we wouldn’t be asking if we had any other choice.”

“I know that.” Elkins strokes the wood gently. “The case is made of aromatic cedar. A wood known for protection, cleansing, blocking unwanted forces, and vitality.” He then runs one finger along the engraving on the barrel I couldn’t make out earlier. “ _Non timebo mala_. It means, _I will fear no evil_.”

“Psalm 23:4,” I mutter quietly.

Elkins nods. “ _I walk through the valley of the shadow of death; I will fear no evil._ If you’re looking to kill a demon, I believe that’s where you’ll be traveling soon.” Tenderly, he closes the lid and flips the latch. He holds it for a few moments longer before handing it to my dad. “As of now, Mark, you and your daughter are the only two people in the world that know the Colt is real, aside from me. I know that John needs to know. Maybe even his boys. But…let’s keep the circle closed from then on, all right?”

Dad nods earnestly. “I can’t thank you enough, Dan. We’ll keep it safe, I swear on my life. We’ll even return it to you once we’re done.”

“Then you’d better not waste all the bullets,” Elkins says flatly. 

I smile, but I have the better sense not to laugh. But I want to laugh, and it’s not from Elkins’ joke.

I led us here. We have the Colt. We fucking did it!

The ride down the mountain is slower than going up. That’s just fine with me. I sit in the passenger’s seat cradling the gun case in my lap. I want to take out the Colt and hold that, too, but I’m almost too afraid.

“You did good, Harley,” Dad says. “I’m very, very proud of you. We wouldn’t have gotten this far if it weren’t for you.”

Aw, that’s so sweet. I hope my eyes don’t brim with tears. “Thanks, Dad.”

“Since we have no radio reception or cell service…” Dad pauses and wiggles his eyebrows impishly “…how about some trivia?”

I grin. “Sure, Dad.”

“Get my duffel and dig out the _Time3_ Journey tape.” ******

I do so and pop it in the cassette player. Dad fast forwards it for a while and stops at the tail end of a song. When the next one starts, a smile spreads across my face. “Hey, it’s _Good Times_.”

“Very good. Is it bringing up memories you can’t recall?”

I analyze the nostalgic feeling in my stomach and realize that’s the perfect way to describe it. “Yeah.”

“When you were born, you would cry nonstop.” Dad grins and I hang my head shamefully. “I’m serious, kid, you would not stop. We would hold you, rock you, walk around with you, take you on a car ride. Nothing. Until one day I played this song. I was walking around the front room trying to put you to sleep. I played this album, but when it got to this song…well, let’s just say I never thought I’d live to see the day you’d stop crying. You stopped, you looked at me, but it seemed as if you were listening. I turned the volume up. You kept quiet, relaxed a bit, and eventually fell asleep. I had to play that song on repeat every day until you were nearly a year old.”

I laugh and put my face in my hands. “Oh my god. That’s embarrassing and awesome. How can you still listen to it after all this time?”

Dad turns to me. “Because it reminds me of you, darlin’.” He turns back to the road, makes a left at the upcoming fork, and then says, “Trivia time. This song is actually a cover. Do you know who wrote the original?”

“Not a clue.”

“Oh, come on, you’re not even going to try? What are the roots of the sound?”

“I don’t know, it seems sort of…blues? Jazz?”

Dad nods, urging me to guess.

“Etta James?”

He bursts out laughing.

“Ok, fine. Albert King?”

“No, but that’s a good guess.”

“Come on, I give up. It’s not often I do that.”

“All right, all right. Sam Cooke wrote and performed the original.”

“I have no idea who that is–” I stop and squint ahead. “What’s that guy doing?”

“Waving us down. Must be having car trouble.” Dad pulls the Camaro up behind an old Nissan truck parked on the side of the dirt road, where a slender, dark haired man stops waving. “You gonna stay here?”

“Yeah,” I say, and rest my head back against the seat. “Maybe take a nap.”

Dad chuckles and gets out of the car. I hear him say, “Hey there! Car trouble?”

“Yep, she just crapped out on me. Might be the battery. I think I need a jump.”

“No problem, I have cables in–”

A dull thud, followed by a louder thump, cuts off Dad’s words. I open my eyes and see the man standing over my dad lying unconscious on the ground, pipe in hand. He looks me dead in the eyes, and I know I’m done for. I scramble around for a weapon, a gun, a knife, anything, digging for it in the back seat. The Colt case falls off my lap on to the floor and I turn back around. Oh. Shit.

There’s no time to think. I open the case, load the cartridges, and close it back up just as my car door opens. The man grabs me by the collar and tries to heave me out.

“You – _sonuvabitch,”_ I growl through gritted teeth as I fight him, punch him, whack him in the kneecap with the Colt as I hang halfway out of the car. The man stops and effortlessly yanks the gun from my hand like he was picking a flower. He’s got some serious strength. Then he returns the blow I gave by pistol-whipping me in the temple, and I black out.

My dad’s screams rouse me, and I wake to find myself tied to a tree.

The man sure didn’t waste time. My dad is beaten and bloody, tied to a tree about ten yards away. His head hangs forward, a mixture of saliva and blood seep from his mouth. And the man laughs.

“I thought hunters were supposed to hold up better than this,” he chuckles.

“Let’s see how well you hold up once I get out of these ropes!” I yell.

The man turns to me. “You think I’m a hunter? I – I’m offended. I would never pretend to pose as the monsters that destroy my kind.”

“Harley, don’t,” my dad warns me.

I frown. Time to kick into overdrive. Creatures that look like humans, can possess humans, have control of their animalistic, douche-baggery nature. Shapeshifter, most likely. Vampire? Maybe. I should call Elkins. But vamps don’t usually torture their prey. A type of ghost possession? It would have to be a _very_ pissed off ghost. Ghost possession is rare. He’s too composed to be a revenant. He’s too…human.

The man turns back to my Dad, knife in hand. I see the Colt stowed in the back of his jeans. He must not know what it is or he’d have taken off. That begs the question, what does this guy want with us? He kneels down, his face inches from my dad’s, and drags the knife slowly down his cheek. My dad grits his teeth.

“Stop it, you asshole!” I shout.

“Tell me where it is,” the man hisses.

“I told you, I don’t know. It’s not real.”

He’s after the Colt? But it’s in his pants!

“Bull. Your daughter spent quite some time trying to track it down. Who would put that much effort into something that isn’t real?”

My dad stays quiet and looks at me. I shake my head. This conversation’s obviously gone on for some time, and Dad’s smart enough not to talk. But the man’s getting fed up with the silence. I need to get out of my binds. I’m just a sitting duck here. Rocks. I need sharp rocks. I slowly work on shimmying down the tree so I can touch the dirt.

“I know what you’ve been hunting. I know how desperate you’ve been. Don’t you know your efforts have been futile? It’s been entertaining, to say the least. Tell me what you know.”

Dad spits out a mouthful of blood and saliva. “We hunt…lots of things,” he pants. “Hardly anything like you, though.”

“Why? Are we too advanced for you?”

“No. We just never had the right weapon.”

My eyes fly open. Holy crap he’s a demon.

The demon sighs in a sassy way, almost like he rolled his eyes at the same time. “You’ve been working with John Winchester. Tell me what you know.”

Silence.

“Are you willing to die for that man?”

A bird whistles in the distance.

“No? How about your daughter?”

I freeze. I’ve never really been scared for my life before, or my dad’s. Not like this. Not while I was helpless, tied to a tree. I was always able to come to my dad’s rescue, or he to mine. Is this finally going to be the end? There are no rocks where I can reach. Just lots of pine needles. The only thing I can do is try to pull out of the ropes by hand.

The demon stalks towards me. I stop wiggling. My mind goes blank. Is he going to kill me? Just like that? I eye the knife in his hand as my dad yells out.

“Stop! I’ll talk. Just don’t harm her.”

The demon stomps back. “The Colt, Mark Cooper, I want the Colt.”

“You’d have it if I had it,” Dad says lightly.

“You’re telling me that your sudden thousand mile journey to the middle of Colorado to visit that hermit who only comes out to hunt vampires was for nothing?”

Dad offers an awkward shrug. “Not all leads turn out. That hermit just confirmed that it isn’t real.”

“I know there’s a weapon, Mark Cooper. A weapon to kill anything.”

So he’s after the Colt, after a weapon, but he doesn’t know what kind. Doesn’t know that it’s in his possession. If _hunters_ think the Colt is a legend, how did a supernatural creature figure it out? He’s been stalking us, that’s for sure. Just like a demon stalked John. Maybe the same demon?

“Even if there is a weapon, what are you going to do with it? Kill yourself?” Dad snarls. Now I realize he’s taunting the demon to kill time. He’s seen me trying to get out of the ropes. He must know I’ve almost got it. “You don’t have any reason to need it.”

“I need it to protect someone.”

“Protect someone? Since when does something like you need to protect anything? No, I think you want it so you can destroy it. Because you’re afraid of it. Of a weapon that can _end you for good_. It would be a shame if it were nearby, if you could see what was right in front of your–”

The demon kneels down and drives his knife deep into my dad’s abdomen, moving slowly so he can watch the effect on my dad’s face. Dad’s eyes widen, he grunts in pain, in shock.

_“No!”_ I scream so loud my throat hurts. Forget pain. A broken wrist means nothing if I’ll be dead in a few minutes. I give one last hard yank out of the ropes and groan. I definitely did something to my left wrist. Maybe a sprain. But at least I’m free.

The demon still hisses in my dad’s ear. He doesn’t hear me come up behind him, not over the sound of the gurgling as my dad chokes on the blood seeping up from his stomach. I grab the Colt from the demon’s pants and leap back, gun at the ready. The demon swiftly pulls the knife out of my dad and turns and laughs.

“A gun? Your daddy hasn’t taught you much, has he?” He blinks, and his eyes turn black. “Guns can’t kill demons, sweetheart. You’re just going to destroy the meatsuit.”

“Guns can’t,” I concede. “The Colt can.”

Realization dawns on the demon’s face as I pull the trigger, lodging a bullet cleanly into his forehead.

I’ve never seen anything like it. As the body falls back, bolts of red electricity stemming from the bullet wound course over it. I’ve seen an exorcism. I know when a demon leaves its…meatsuit, as this demon put it, it leaves in a trail of black smoke. But the Colt lives up to its reputation as it obliterates the demon and, unfortunately, the human inside.

“Dad,” I whisper as I run to his side. He’s bleeding bad, right near the center of his abdomen. The demon did some damage, maybe even nicked the aorta. “Dad, I’m sorry.”

“No, Harley,” he gasps. “I’m…sorry.”

“We’ve got to get you out of here. Let’s get you to the car–”

“Harley…”

“But Dad…”

I know what he wants to say. I know. But I don’t want to believe it. Tears well in my eyes and run down my cheeks, into my mouth.

“I’m sorry, Harley,” he says again, weakly. “I’m sorry for how I raised you.”

“Dad–”

“Let…let me speak. I always knew you were…ow…going to be a hunter. It goes back generations in our family. But it was never…supposed to be a full-time deal.”

I sniff in a bunch of boogers and wipe my face with my hand. Somehow my face comes out more wet, and I realize I smeared my dad’s blood on my cheek.

“I had a job, a wife and kids. Hunting was just a part of that life. I still did it because…it was a part of the world that was scary, and a…part of the world very little people knew about. My mother always said _someone_ has to make the world a safer place…But then Logan died. And Abigail died–”

My loud sob cuts him off. “It’s my–”

Dad reaches out and touches my cheek. “No, Harley, you can’t blame yourself. It’s not your fault. You didn’t cause this. I left the gun on the table. And your mother made that decision herself.”

I sob again, sniff in boogers again.

“After I sold the house and we hit the road…I don’t know. Hunting was the only way to keep my mind off the things I lost. You weren’t supposed to be raised that way. You were supposed to learn how to be a hunter while going to school, playing soccer…having friends. And when you were old enough, you could hunt on your own. But your life was never supposed to be consumed by it.”

“That’s why I shared the music with you, Harley. It was the only happy thing I could give you.”

“My life wasn’t bad,” I manage to say through a sob. “Except for Logan and Mom, I wouldn’t change a thing.”

My dad smiles. “I love you, Harley,” he whispers.

“Love you too, Dad.”

He places a heavy hand on the Colt. “You need…to give this to John.”

“I will, Dad.”

“He’s…been looking for this…for 19 years. It’s…”

The last breath of life leaves his body and his head falls limp on his chest.

¨ ¨ ¨

Azazel radiates a tinge of irritation. Centuries of planning, ruined.

It started with Barbatos. His least favorite son, to be sure, but he was still wanted _alive_. Killed by the bullet destined for Azazel himself. And at the hands of a mere child!

Mark Cooper’s daughter was not to be underestimated, just like her father. Azazel had led John Winchester to the answers like one leads a horse to water, and still he refused to drink. For two centuries of Azazel’s time. And then the girl found the weapon in a matter of months, according to Rangda.

Rangda and Naberus had both returned, but no one had seen or heard from Barbatos. It was possible he was discovered by Mark Cooper and sent back to Hell, but Azazel spread word far and wide and heard nothing in response. So Rangda worked her way topside once more – no easy feat, after returning so recently – and searched for her brother. She had said, how could Barbatos have disappeared off the face of the Earth, _and_ from Hell?

She thought about searching for Mark Cooper, but he was nowhere to be found, either. Still, she tracked him to the mountains, but instead of Barbatos, she found the meatsuit he was inhabiting that decomposed quickly due to the elements. And the bullet wound in his forehead, the marks on his decaying skin…it could only be from one thing.

Rangda relayed her discoveries to Azazel from Earth after spilling the blood of an innocent. The Colt! The weapon made long ago, the weapon that could kill anything. The hunters had it, and they were after Azazel!

Her concern for him was heartening. He used it to his advantage. Azazel ordered her to find the Colt. Now that the weapon was out in the open, it shouldn’t take long for her to find. And then it wouldn’t be long before Azazel went topside and opened the Devil’s Gate.

If only it were that simple. Centuries later, Rangda was exorcised back to Hell, trapped down even further than Lilith. Naberus was killed in the same fashion as his brother.

Azazel’s irritation boils into rage as the fires surrounding him grow larger. All of his children were gone. His plans derelict. Fine, then. No more relying on minions to complete his requests.

It was time he did it himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * Stevie Nicks wasn’t inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist until 2019, but the Hall of Fame questions were just too good to pass up. I learned of the Stevie Nicks and Eric Clapton facts from my coworker during our classic rock trivia moments. (I am also named after the female band members of Fleetwood Mac and have a serious love of their music, so "falsifying" dates was rough for me haha).
> 
> ** ‘Good Times’ by Journey wasn’t released until 1992, on the Time3 3 CD box set, but the album was recorded between 1976-1985. Harley was born in 1979, so there’s obviously no way this scenario would be plausible, but I wanted it in my fic because it’s a true story. I was born in 1992, my dad is a huge classic rock fan, and he would have to play ‘Good Times’ on our gigantic Technics Tower stereo system, the old brown wood one with the glass front, over and over and OVER until I fell asleep.


	2. Wendigo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The beginning of this chapter had some major editing to accommodate the new prior one. 
> 
> Harley and Dean were so young and immature in the first half of the story it's so cute.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everything in the next 9 or so chapters feels so...generic, honestly. As I move on to later chapters, I'm not so conforming to the script, I write in more jokes, I actually use my imagination. It's how it should have been from the get-go. But I guess I'm bound to learn some things between the ages of 20 and 28. So don't take chapters 2-9 personally haha.

He had a hunter’s burial. That was the last thing I could give him. A salted body burning on a pyre while the corpse of the demon that killed him rotted at my feet.

Tears ran down my cheeks the entire time I collected the wood, trekked back to the Camaro to find the salt and twine. I don’t think I was even aware that I was still crying. It just seemed like the only thing worth doing. There was no other way to feel.

I didn’t have a tarp big enough to cover his body, so I stripped the demon of his jacket and shirt. At least my dad’s face was covered. I dug a hole around the pyre so the fire wouldn’t spread. I watched it burn for about an hour until I realized I’d attract the attention of someone. If not Smokey Bear, then the demon’s buddies. It was time to leave.

My first task was to make it down the mountain into the range of cell service without crashing into a tree. I had to get ahold of John, give him the damn Colt, and figure out what the hell to do with my life now. Where do I go? Who do I turn to? I have no family. No home. I could hunt, but for some reason I don’t want to. I want to crawl into a dark hole and die.

I finally make it to the town of Manning and call John. We agree to meet at the Roadhouse. Cedar, Nebraska is nearly 700 miles away, but if I drive straight through I could make it in 11 hours. The desire to be rid of the gun drives me through the journey without a break, save for a pit stop for gas.

Just like I predicted, I reach the Roadhouse a little after sunrise. I park next to John’s Impala, so at least I know he’s here. But when I walk into the building I don’t see him inside.

I head to the back, to the small, square bar, and wait impatiently on a barstool for Ellen to finish talking to Dale Walters so I can ask her where John Winchester is. I bore my eyes into the wall of bourbon until my vision glazes over.

“Harley?” Ellen calls me out of my reverie.

“Hmm?” I look over.

“Harley, honey, what’s wrong? Where’s Mark?”

“Funny you should ask.” I laugh now, an almost hysterical laugh, and get up off the stool. I sway a little, somewhat lightheaded. “He’s gone.”

Ellen’s face grows confused. She knows what I mean, but still she asks quietly, “Gone where?”

“He’s dead, Ellen. My dad’s _dead_.”

“What?”

The voice throws me off guard. I turn around and see John and Dean standing in the doorway, their backs illuminated by the early morning sun. John walks closer. Confusion and disbelief wage war on his face, but both are replaced by irrefutable sorrow as he realizes the truth.

“What happened, Harley?” he demands.

“We…we found it,” I whisper weakly. “And then it killed him.”

I don’t know why, maybe it’s the fatigue and the stress and basically the end of my purpose in life, but I faint for the very first time.

I guess I didn’t stay out for long because when I wake I’m in Dean’s arms and we’re crouched near the floor, like he caught me before I hit the ground. How chivalrous of him. I sit up on my own and rub my head. Thankfully there’s only a handful of patrons in this early or that would have been a whole lot more embarrassing.

“You okay?” Dean asks in his deep, gruff voice.

“Yeah.”

John stares down at me. “What happened to Mark?” he says again, with a strangely eerie authoritative tone.

“It’s not a conversation for a crowd,” I say quietly.

John nods once to me, once to Dean, and they help me to my feet. We leave Ellen without another word and head back to the cars. I lean into the passenger’s side of the Camaro and remove the beautiful cedar box that I now hate because of what it contains.

“Daniel Elkins had this,” I say in a low voice, and hand it over to John. He opens it immediately and his eyes bug out, as do Dean’s as he looks over John’s shoulder. “But a demon was tailing us, like one had done to you, and it killed him.”

“What happened to the demon?” John asks.

“I killed it. With that.” I nod toward the Colt.

John stares down at the box in his hands like it just grew serpent heads. He shakes his head and shouts, “Son of a bitch!”

"Dad?" Dean asks tentatively.

“I…” John steps aside and lifts his face to the sky. He breathes deeply for a while, slow and steady. When he turns back, his eyes shine the faintest bit. It looked like a helluva battle to not cry. Now _I_ want to cry thinking about John wanting to cry.

“I owe _everything_ to your dad, Harley. He was a great man, an amazing hunter. I’m truly sorry.”

My throat tightens and I nod. “Have you found anything on your demon?” I ask.

“Actually, yes. Your lead in Missouri didn’t pan out, but then Bobby Singer called. He, uh…well, he had some news.” John takes a deep breath and lets it out. “There’s been an excess of demonic omens around Wyoming. Cattle mutilations, electrical storms, that sort of thing. Bobby and Rowen David have been in contact, and there’s been sightings of a yellow-eyed demon.”

I frown. “That doesn’t make sense. Demon’s eyes are black.”

“Crossroads demon’s eyes are said to be red,” Dean points out.

I nod acceptingly.

“Both Bobby and David think it’s a sign of a more powerful demon, someone who doesn’t usually leave Hell,” John continues. “That’s why the sudden surge in demonic omens. I’m heading out there now.”

I glance at Dean. “You’re not going with him?”

“Nah, I’m officially on my own now. No more leash. No more checking in every hour. Got a possible case in Colorado, actually.”

“It wasn’t every hour,” John grumbles as he heads to the Impala and pops the trunk. “And don’t forget that you only have that case in Colorado because _I_ found it for you.”

“Dammit, Dad,” Dean groans, rolling his eyes. He turns away to hide his red face.

I stand there with Dean while an awkward silence fills the air. He sort of grins at me, just enough to show his dimples, but then his face turns somber. Almost as if he was going to crack a joke but then remembered my dad just died and I probably wasn’t in the mood.

“Where are you headed now?” he asks after a moment.

I shrug. “No idea. Probably hang out here for a while. Drink. A lot.”

Dean just shakes his head and smiles. “If you want, you can come with me to Colorado.”

My stomach lurches. Colorado? Back to the scene of my dad’s death?

No, I can’t think like that. The job’s the job.

Dean goes on, “It will be like the old days, sort of.”

“Old days?” I say with a slight laugh. “You mean being cooped up in a motel room pretending to hunt monsters with unloaded sawed-offs while our dads teamed up on a case?”

Dean grins mischievously, swiveling on his feet with his hands buried in his oversized jacket pockets. “Well, yeah, but now we get loaded sawed-offs.”

I sigh, think for a moment. “Maybe a case will get my mind off things…Could be a good idea.”

“All right, kids,” John says, closing the trunk. “I’m off.” He tosses a set of keys in the air, and Dean catches them easily. “She’s yours now.”

Dean grins. “Technically she’s been mine since I was 18, you just didn’t want to let up the reins.” He notes the heavy pack over John’s shoulder. “What about you?”

“I’ll manage.”

I glance at the Impala, then at the Camaro, then back at the Impala. If I go with Dean to Colorado, we really won’t need two cars. He’d take the Impala, John wouldn’t have a car…

“Harley?” Dean says.

“Hmm?” I look up from running my hand lightly over the shiny yellow paint. Then I look back down, trace my fingers over the black rally stripes along the hood. “John…do you want to take the Camaro?”

“No, I’ll manage,” John says again.

“But…I’m going with Dean. We don’t need two cars.” I close my eyes. This won’t be easy. “Anyone who can take as good of care of the Impala after all these years is good enough to take my car.”

“But it was your dad’s car,” John presses.

“Look, don’t make this any harder than it has to be,” I say, a little harshly. “Maybe we’ll cross paths again soon. You can give it back then. It will be on long-term loan.”

John gives me a sympathetic look. “All right, thank you. You’ve already given me so much.”

I shove the keys in his hands. “Yeah.”

The couple of bags I have are already packed. Dean takes them and tosses them in the back seat of his car along with his stuff.

“Got everything?” he asks.

“Almost.” I take an empty backpack from the trunk and stuff my small collection of books on ancient lore inside. Then I add a sawed-off – the first one I made by myself – a knife with my dad’s initials, and a couple of other odds and ends from my arsenal. Things that belonged to my dad that I can’t bear to be without. I make sure I have my dad’s journal with me as well.

I pat the hood of my car. _Take care of yourself, baby_ , I think. Before the thought of losing the Camaro sends me over the edge once more, I quickly turn my back and get into the Impala.

Dean says good-bye to his dad and watches him drive off. I can’t look, I can’t stomach the sight of the Camaro fading away down the road, so I keep my head forward and study the old wood of the Roadhouse.

I’ve lost my dad. My car. I’ve got nothing now.

Dean slumps into the driver’s seat with a sigh and slams the door shut. When he starts the engine, Boston’s _Foreplay Long Time_ blares through the speakers. It scares the living hell out of me. I instinctively reach for the volume dial and turn it lower.

“What, you don’t like Boston?” Dean asks, arching an eyebrow as he looks at me from the corner of his eye.

“You kidding? I love Boston. This is my favorite song from them,” I say. “I just also love my eardrums.”

Dean chuckles and throws the car into reverse. “Good. Because if you didn’t, I’d leave you here.”

“Ha-ha,” I sniff. “So how long has it been since I saw you last?”

“I don’t know. Maybe ten years?”

“Wow. I’ve seen your dad since then, though. You were never around, I guess. Are you excited to be out hunting on your own?”

Dean glances at me and smirks. “I am now.”

I raise my eyebrows, then look forward out of the windshield. I hope I don’t blush. That’s really an embarrassing human quality.

“How’s Sam?” I ask.

Dean’s hands tighten on the steering wheel, turning his knuckles white. Eventually, he relaxes them. “Sam’s good. Living the college life. I haven’t seen him in a while.”

“Wow, college!” I say. I can’t believe Dean’s little brother didn’t follow the family hunting tradition. “Where’s he at?”

“Stanford.”

I let out a low whistle. “That’s great. You don’t look too happy about it, though.”

“Sam left,” Dean says shortly.

Apparently, I’ve touched a nerve, so I change the subject. “What year is the Impala again?”

“1967,” Dean says proudly. “She still roars like a lion.”

I can’t help but laugh, feel lighthearted for a moment. It’s easy being with Dean. Kind of like riding a bicycle, muscle memory. Dean and I were fourteen the last time we saw each other. We were starting to get good at hunting. Our dads would take us out on a case, the four of us would work as a team. Sam was only nine or ten at the time, so he would stay with Bobby Singer or Pastor Jim.

To be honest, I’m not surprised Sam didn’t stay with Dean and their dad. I remember Dean tried his hardest to keep Sam’s innocence, to hide from him what was really out there in the dark. He would tell me about the different stories he’d make up about where their dad was when Sam would ask why he was gone or when he was coming home. And when I was older I saw how John was for myself. No, I don’t blame Sam for leaving at all.

When we’re on a main highway, little drops of rain patter down on the windshield. I rest my head back and watch them collect on my window. I don’t speak, and for a long time, Dean doesn’t try to get me to talk. I’m thankful for that. I really just need to rest, relax, take a moment to sort through the millions of emotions coursing through my body. The last thing I remember is watching a couple of raindrops race from the top of the passenger window to the bottom before I drift off into darkness.

My eyes pop open and I gasp, sit up straight and look around wildly. Where am I? Why is it so dark? I frantically search my jacket for a knife and freak out when I can’t find it.

“Hey, hey, hey – Harley, calm down.” Dean reaches over and grabs my wrist. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”

“What? I – nothing.” My chest heaves with the stress of trying to get air into my lungs. Dean lets me go when I’m a little calmer. “Sorry.”

“Bad dream?” he asks.

“More like lack of dream.” I rub my eyes. “It was so dark, but there was so much pain and fear…” My brain finally processes what my eyes have been observing but not seeing – it’s pitch black outside. “What time is it?”

“About eight-thirty.”

“Holy crap,” I mutter. “Where are we?”

“Just outside of Grand Junction.” Dean drums his fingers on the steering wheel and hums, nodding his head to the song. He sings in a low voice, “ _Shoot to thrill, play to kill. I got my gun at the ready, gonna fire at will.”_

“I slept all that way?” I grab the map of Colorado from the bench seat between us. Along the most western border is a red X and the numbers 35-111. Coordinates. I study the area surrounding the X. At least it’s nowhere near where my dad’s bones are. “These are the coordinates your dad gave you?”

“Yep. Why?” Dean asks.

“It’s just, this Blackwater Ridge…”

“What about it?”

“Well, there’s nothing there. It’s just woods.” I look at Dean. “Why was he going to send you to the middle of nowhere?”

“Dad loves a challenge,” Dean says cryptically. “I’m starving. Let's stop at the next place we see for some food.”

It’s another forty-five minutes before we reach any signs of civilization, and the closest source of food is a burger joint. I’m not hungry, but it’s been so long since I’ve eaten that I should probably try.

The sky pours buckets when we stop in front of the small building. I pull my jacket up over my head while we race inside. After being in the dark for so long, the fluorescent lights reflecting off of the cheap linoleum floor hurts my eyes. I grimace and head for a booth.

It doesn’t take long for our burgers to reach our table, and Dean scarfs his down like he hasn’t eaten in days. I manage to get down half the burger and a couple of fries, at least.

While Dean stews in his food coma, I ask, “Want me to drive for a bit? You’ve been driving for more than twelve hours.”

Dean’s hand stops halfway to his mouth and he drops the fry he was holding. He clears his throat, dips his head and looks up at me through lowered lids. “Look, uh, no one drives my baby,” he says, trying to keep a pleasant smile on his face. “No offense to you or anything.”

“Your baby? You’ve had the car for less than a day,” I point out. I receive a death glare in response, so I raise my hands in surrender. “Fine. Don’t blame me if you fall asleep at the wheel.”

“I’ve driven for way longer than twelve hours before,” he insists.

“All right, all right.”

Dean waves the waitress over and picks up the whole tab. I try to shove my ten dollars at him, but he just shakes his head and wiggles a black credit card between two fingers.

“It’s on Henry Wilkshire,” he says with an impish grin. Oh, right. Credit card fraud.

We stop at a nearby gas station before hitting the road again. I pull out the map while I wait and try to measure with my finger how many miles we have to go until we reach Blackwater Ridge. The length is barely longer than my fingernail.

“We’ve got less than a hundred miles to go,” I tell Dean.

“Sweet.”

Underneath the front seat is an old, battered shoe box full of cassette tapes. I rummage through it, finding most of the music my dad and I used to listen to. Boston, The Cult, Metallica, Rolling Stones, Motorhead. I fight the tears until I come across one of my all-time favorite albums and pre-load it into the tape player.

Dean recaps the gas tank and gets in the car. Once the engine turns over, I give the tape a little nudge into the slot.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Dean snaps.

I scrunch my face in confusion. “Changing the music.”

“Dude, that’s a huge no-go.”

“What? Why?”

“Driver picks the music. Shotgun shuts his cakehole,” Dean says smugly.

“But I picked from _your_ collection!”

Dean hits the eject button. “That’s not the point. It’s about what the _driver_ wants.” He glances down at the tape. For a few moments, the only sound is the rumble of the engine. Then he puts the tape back in.

“Change of heart?” I ask snidely.

“ _No_.” Dean clears his throat. “This is just…decent.”

“Mmhmm.”

The beginning chords to Led Zeppelin’s _Custard Pie_ sound through the speakers. I make the guitar sounds with my voice and Dean stifles a laugh.

The next couple of hours pass swiftly, and I’m comforted by the fact that my dad would be happy I’m enjoying the music again. We sing every single track on the cassette together, with me on air guitar and Dean using the steering wheel as a drum. I almost miss the sign that reads, _Welcome to Lost Creek, Colorado_.

“We’re here,” I point out.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Let’s find a motel or something, then we’ll head to the Ranger Station first thing in the morning.”

I nod and yawn loudly.

The town is relatively small, but it still takes a few circles around it to find the only lodgings in the area, a small inn. Dean parks in front of the main office and we walk inside.

A young guy, maybe in his mid-twenties, mans the desk. He doesn’t look up from his portable video game at the sound of the bell over the door. “Welcome to Lost Creek Inn,” he says mechanically.

Dean slides Henry Wilkshire’s credit card over and clears his throat loudly. The guy finally tears his eyes away from his game, only to train them on me and give me a long once-over. A smirk pulls at the sides of his mouth. I narrow my eyes. “One room?” he asks slyly.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Two beds.”

The guy clacks away on a keyboard. “Ah, sorry, man. Only thing we have available is a queen.” His smirk widens.

I roll my eyes. Sure you do, Norman Bates Jr. He’s probably putting us up in the room next to his where he installed a two-way mirror or drilled a peep-hole in the wall.

“That’s fine,” Dean says distractedly.

The guy continues to eye Dean. Dean just smiles obliviously. Finally, the guy returns the credit card and hands over a room key. “Enjoy your stay,” he says with a wink.

I storm out of the office, disgusted. “What was that all about?” I snap.

“Whoa, hey, I didn’t do anything.”

I sigh angrily. “Yeah, I know. Guys are so perverted.” I cross my arms over my chest and watch Dean unload our bags.

“If the single bed thing bothers you, I can sleep on the floor,” Dean offers.

After a big inhale and a long exhale, I ease up. “No, it’s all right. I’m sure the bed is big enough.”

Dean hands me my stuff, then gestures to himself. “Yeah, but _I’m_ also pretty big.”

There’s no denying that. Dean is six-feet-two-inches of dark-haired, green-eyed, muscly handsomeness all wrapped up in a worn-out leather jacket, jeans and boots that give him a bad-ass look, even though he’s still got a baby face under the stubble.

“We’ll manage,” I say, feeling the knot in my stomach twist nervously.

Room 105 is only a few doors down from the office, so we leave the Impala where it’s parked and walk over. Dean unlocks the door and flips on the lights.

I dump my bags on the bed and run to the bathroom. “Gotta pee!” I call over my shoulder. I hear Dean laugh.

It’s quiet, and a little awkward, between us as we change and get ready for bed. I guess ratty old sweats are in style, because Dean and I both pull on a pair. Only, I’ve got an oversized holey Smith’s t-shirt on and the sweats are all he’s wearing, besides the gold Aztec amulet hanging around his neck by a thin black cord. I can’t believe he still wears that. Sam gave it to Dean one Christmas when we were kids. I joked around and called it the Samulet. The name stuck.

My eyes are glued to Dean’s body, particularly his hips. The sweats hang dangerously low due to the worn-out waistline. I try not to look at the lines and curves of his bare, hairless chest that lead down below the sweatpants.

Dean sits in one of the chairs and fiddles with a gun. I pull back the thick comforter on the bed and perch myself on the very edge, making sure to leave plenty of room for him. He looks up as I wiggle around to see how much space I’ll need.

“You can relax, Harley. I’m not gonna bite. I’m sure you’ll survive if our bodies touch during the night.”

By the way my heart skips a beat and begins racing, I’d say my body is actually hoping that would happen…but I would never admit that.

I scoot down deeper under the covers and lay on my side, arms wrapped around a pillow. I watch Dean clean the gun for a while before I ask, “What do you think’s out there?”

“Could be anything.” He shrugs. “I don’t know why my dad just gave me some coordinates and said, ‘Here, have at it!’ without any background information.” Dean jams a thin metal rod wrapped in a rag down the barrel of the gun. “It’s almost like he wants me to fail on my first case by myself.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” I say quietly.

“Oh yeah?” Dean scoffs. “You must not remember my dad very much, do you? He’s a hard-ass, always testing me and trying to prove me wrong. He’s never happy or proud when I do something good because I could’ve done better.”

Dean tosses part of the gun on the table without bothering to put it back together. I’m tempted to get up and give him a hug, but I’m sure that would just kill his ego. Before I have a chance to say or do anything, Dean turns off the lights and crawls into bed.

I roll onto my back, keeping as still as a statue. Dean lays on his back as well, his arms tucked under his head.

“We’ll have to see if there are any missing persons or murders in the area,” he says. “Then we can narrow our suspect pool to something that hunts in wooded areas.”

“That’s still a large suspect pool.”

“But it’s a start.” Dean yawns, stretching his arms, and he’s out in seconds.

It takes me a while to fall asleep. I think of a few different things at once. My dad’s death, Dean sleeping beside me, the case that we’re about to work together, if there even is a case. It takes a while for my mind to wind down before I actually drift off into darkness.

Like earlier in the car, I have another dreamless sleep. My mind reaches out in the blackness, searching for any signs of life, of light, but the only thing it finds is pain. The pain of loss, of heartbreak. But there’s another type of pain I can’t quite figure out. Sort of like pressure. Maybe my mind is going to implode.

I can feel myself coming to yet I don’t open my eyes. Part of me wants to continue to sleep and not wake up for a long, long time, but not if the blackness is all I have during unconsciousness. My body feels sort of stiff, I can’t move much. It shouldn’t be this hard to move around in bed, no matter how groggy I am. It almost feels like I’ve been drugged. I squirm around, panic starting to arise. I can’t shake the heavy weight pressing down on my chest and stomach.

The panic instills a fear inside me that I’ve been captured, tied up underneath something heavy. Is it the demon? Am I still in the woods? A sweat breaks on my forehead as flashbacks to that day flood my mind.

My consciousness grows stronger now, and with it the weight gets stronger, too. I don’t want to wake up, I don’t want to open my eyes and see that I’m not in Colorado, in the inn with Dean sleeping next to me. I don’t want to find out that I’ve been kidnapped by a monster.

I can’t contain the suspense any longer. I hold very still and slowly open one eyelid, looking down towards my chest. Immediately, I sigh and open both of my eyes. Sometime during the night, Dean rolled over on top of me and decided to use my body as a pillow. His head rests on my chest, one muscly arm thrown over my stomach. I run my fingers through his short, soft brown hair. He doesn’t stir.

We left the curtains closed last night and the clock is on Dean’s side of the bed so I can’t tell what time it is. I think he set an alarm, though. I snuggle in closer to him, still stroking his hair. Eventually I fall back asleep, my hand resting on the back of his neck.

The next time I wake it’s because Dean’s body shakes the bed as he gets up. The radio plays a Pink Floyd song, which means the alarm went off and it’s sometime around eight.

“Morning,” Dean says with a yawn on his way to the bathroom.

“Morning,” I reply to the bathroom door. I try not to listen as he relieves himself.

I sit up and stretch, feeling kind of sore after being squished for most of the night. The echo of last night’s events float around in my head. I don’t know why I reacted the way I did to feeling a pressure on my chest. Even yesterday in the car, I freaked out for no reason when I woke up. I want to say it’s like I’ve been traumatized, but there isn’t much that can freak me out, considering the life I’ve led so far. The only thing I can think is that maybe my dad’s death messed me up more than I thought. It’s only been a couple of days.

Dean comes out of the bathroom and flops back on the bed. “Sorry for using you as a pillow last night.” He flashes a white-toothed smile, the kind that makes his eyes crinkle and the lines around his mouth deepen like dimples. The kind of smile that would make me forgive him for just about anything. “I forgot how much I roll around.”

“It’s fine,” I say, my voice cracking. I hope don’t sound too eager, but I don’t want to sound like it bothered me, either, because I wouldn’t mind if he did it again.

“We’d better get going, then. I want to figure out what’s going on around here, fix it, and move on.”

“All right.” I suddenly remember our current rooming conditions and shout, “I call shower first!” as I leap out of the bed ungracefully and almost fall on my face because my foot twisted up in the sheets. It also didn’t help that Dean rolled over and made a grab for the back of my pants.

“So all the hot water can be gone by the time I get in?” Dean says. He jumps off the bed and pulls me back by my waist. “Not a chance!”

I try to wriggle myself out of his grip, fighting him about as much as I try to fight the nagging thought that I’m enjoying this. “What-happened-to- _ladies_ - _first_?” I gasp through my struggling.

Dean just laughs and releases me. “Fine. But after ten minutes I’m picking the lock and flushing the toilet until you leave.”

I never give Dean the chance to run me out of the shower. While he takes his turn, I dress in dark jeans, black boots, a gray sleeveless shirt and a green jacket. I’m braiding my wet hair when Dean opens the bathroom door, releasing large cloud of steam. He emerges from the white wisps of water in just a towel. My heart skips a beat and my fingers almost lose their place in my hair.

“Sorry,” Dean says, grinning at my expression and not looking sorry at all. “Forgot my underwear.”

“Mmhmm,” I mumble quietly, watching him walk across the room and back through lowered lids. The towel shows off even more than his sweats did last night. Maybe this one-room thing will be too much for me.

I tie off the bottom of my braid with a hair band. Of the few things I actually like about myself, my hair is one of them. It’s kind of a warm brown and finally reaches down to my mid-back. My hair might be a striking feature if my eyes weren’t a plain brown set in a simple, boring face. I’d look stunning if I had Dean’s intense green eyes.

“Ready?” Dean asks a few minutes later.

“Yeah.”

It’s a short drive to the ranger station. We go inside and look around the empty main office. My attention is immediately drawn to a 3-D map of the forest. I locate the isolated hump labeled Blackwater Ridge.

“Blackwater Ridge is pretty remote,” I tell Dean as he browses the pictures on the wall, completely distracted.

“Dude, check out the size of this freaking bear,” Dean says excitedly, pointing at a framed photo of a man standing in front of a fallen bear that’s about as tall as the man is.

“And a dozen or more grizzlies in the area,” I add. “It’s no nature hike, that’s for sure.”

Dean’s eyes glance past my shoulder, and his expression makes me turn around. I come face-to-face with a forest ranger and jump back, startled.

“You kids aren’t planning on going out near Blackwater Ridge by any chance?” the ranger asks suspiciously.

“Oh, no, sir,” I say, putting on my best innocent face. “We’re environmental study majors from UC Boulder. Just working on a paper.” I laugh a little.

Dean grins and fist pumps the air. “Recycle, man.”

“Bull,” the ranger says dully.

My eyes flick to Dean. He doesn’t move or say anything.

“You’re friends with that Halie girl, right?”

I open my mouth, although I’m lost for words. Dean picks up quicker than I do. “Yes. Yes, we are, Ranger –” He peers closer to the ranger’s nametag “–Wilkinson.”

“Well, I’ll tell you exactly what we told her.” He seems agitated to be repeating his story yet again. “Her brother filled out a backcountry permit saying he wouldn’t be back from Blackwater until the twenty-fourth, so it’s not exactly a missing persons now, is it?” Dean and I both shake our heads. “You tell that girl to quit worrying. I’m sure her brother’s just fine.”

“We will,” I assure the ranger.

There’s an uncomfortable silence when none of us speaks. This may just be the lead we’re looking for, but I feel like this is my first gig and I’ve lost the ability to lie.

“Well, that Halie girl’s quite a pistol, huh?” Dean finally says with a nervous laugh.

“That’s putting it mildly,” the ranger says blandly.

“Actually, you know what would help is if I could show her a copy of that backcountry permit. You know, so she could see her brother’s return date.” Dean looks at Ranger Wilkinson eagerly, pulling his eyebrows together in a pleading action. The ranger eyes him. Dean raises his eyebrows now, smiling in anticipation.

Ten minutes later we leave the ranger station with a copy of the permit. Dean waves the piece of paper around and laughs triumphantly.

“Let’s go talk to this Halie chick and see if we get any good leads,” I say. “I’d rather find out if her brother is really in danger before wandering through the woods looking for a needle in a haystack.” The image of the giant bear flashes in front of my mind and I shudder.

Halie Collins lives in a small suburban area in a quaint, one-story house. We park on the opposite side of the street and walk to the front door. I open the screen to knock and let it close again. A short, slender girl with dark brown hair pulled back into a loose ponytail answers the door. She looks about our age.

“You must be Halie Collins,” Dean says politely. “I’m Dean, this is Harley. We’re, ah, we’re…”

“We’re rangers with the Park Service,” I interject, finishing Dean’s incomplete thought. “Ranger Wilkinson sent us over. He wanted us to ask a few questions about your brother, Tommy.”

Haley hesitates and looks us over. “Let’s see some identification.”

Dean glances at me while he reaches into his jacket for a fake I.D. He pulls out a card from his wallet and holds it up against the screen. Halie examines it briefly. Dean smiles his winning smile, and she opens the door. I feel a slight wave of relief. She just fell for an expired library pass as a Park Ranger identification badge.

“Come on in.”

“Thanks,” Dean says.

“That yours?” Halie asks, nodding to the Impala.

“Yeah,” Dean says proudly, his face glowing.

“Nice car.” She smiles an annoying teasing smile girls use to flirt, where one edge of her mouth pulls up into a seductive smirk and her eyes get all doe-y. There’s no logical reason for this small action to bother me. Yet it does. There’s no romantic relationship between Dean and I – he’s free to be with whomever he wants, as am I. As is this girl, too. Maybe I’m bothered by it simply because she’s better looking than I am.

Halie leads us through the house into the kitchen. A young kid sits at the table with a laptop. He looks up when we enter the room.

“Who are they?” he asks Halie defensively.

“Park Rangers,” Halie says. There’s an edge to her tone, like she doesn’t entirely believe our story but she’s decided to trust us anyway. “Dean, Harley, this is my younger brother, Ben.”

“Hi,” Ben says cautiously. He returns his attention to the laptop without waiting for a response.

Halie gestures to the empty chairs around the table. “Have a seat.”

“We just want to ask you guys a few follow up questions,” Dean says as he pulls out a chair and lowers himself into it.

I sit down next to him. “My first question is, if Tommy’s not due back for a while, how do you know something’s wrong?”

Halie grabs a bowl of popcorn from the counter in the tiny kitchen and sets it on the table before sitting down. Dean eyes the popcorn greedily. Since he hasn't been offered any, he just stares at it like a begging dog.

“He checks in every day by cell," Halie says. "He emails photos, stupid little videos. We haven’t heard anything in over three days now.”

“Well, maybe he can’t get cell reception,” I suggest.

“He’s got a satellite phone, too,” Halie retorts, almost snapping at me.

“Could it be he’s just having fun and forgot to check in?” Dean asks.

“He wouldn’t do that,” Ben says with certainty.

“Our parents are gone,” Halie explains. “It’s just my two brothers and me. We all keep pretty close tabs on each other.”

We go quiet. I try to process the little information Dean and I have so far. A boy and his friends go camping in the woods. The boy updates his family regularly. Suddenly there’s a break in the pattern, but cell reception and a busy schedule aren’t possible interferences. What about a dead battery? Or he lost his phone in a river? There is a chance he just got attacked by a wild animal…

Or, the hunter side of me argues, maybe there’s something supernatural going on.

As a hunter, it’s natural to look for odd signs and strange patterns in all aspects of a situation that regular police or detectives might overlook because they have to find legitimate, tangible evidence to support their theories. But for us, we get to blame things that the majority of people don’t know exist.

Not everything turns out to be a supernatural situation, though. There have been times when my dad and I were dead certain that some sort of monster or evil spirit was causing deaths or accidents and it turns out it was just a real-life serial killer or freak accidents. Dean and I will have to check local legends and lore and plain old history for any clues, though. Even if this sounds like a simple missing persons or animal attack, we have to cover all the bases.

“Can I see the pictures he sent you?” I ask the siblings.

“Yeah,” Ben says. He turns the laptop towards me. On the screen is a series of pictures of four boys in a wooded area. “That’s Tommy.” He points to a happy looking blond-haired boy, who I have to say looks nothing like his darker brother and sister. Ben clicks over to a video. It’s a recording from Tommy. He has the camera focused on his face.

“Hey Halie, Ben,” Tommy says. He’s in a tent with an electric lantern. It must be night time or early morning. “Day six, we’re still out near Blackwater Ridge. We’re fine, keeping safe, so don’t worry, okay? Talk to you tomorrow.”

Something as fast as lightning, a shadow maybe, flashes across the screen, behind Tommy. It was there and gone so quickly I wouldn’t have seen it if I didn’t already believe there were things out there that could move that fast.

“Well, we’ll find your brother,” Dean reassures them. “We’re heading out to Blackwater Ridge tomorrow morning.”

My eyes dart to Dean’s face. We hadn’t agreed on a plan of action yet. I still need to do research on the area.

“Then maybe I’ll see you there,” Halie says. “I can’t sit around here anymore, so I hired a guy. I’m heading out in the morning and I’m going to find Tommy myself.”

“Do you mind forwarding these to me?” I ask Ben. It’s better that I don’t comment on Halie’s ridiculous rescue mission.

“Sure.” He pulls up his email and slides the laptop to me. “Type in your address.”

When the files are sent and we’ve gathered all of the information we can, Dean and I thank Halie and Ben and head out to the car. Once we’re inside, I say accusingly, “So we’re going to Blackwater Ridge in the morning?”

“Well, yeah,” Dean says, as if it were obvious.

“But we don’t even know what’s out there!” I exclaim. “We know nothing about the history of this town. For all we know, this could really be just grizzly attacks.”

“I think you’re forgetting that we have two different styles in hunting,” Dean says. “We need to check out the crime scene.”

“What crime scene, Dean? We don’t even know that the kid is missing!”

“Well, then wouldn’t it be common sense to go check their campsite?” Dean snaps.

“It’s common sense to do research first,” I say. “There’s a chance that this isn’t our type of gig. If it’s not a spirit or some sort of creature, let the Park Service handle it.” Dean doesn’t say anything, so I continue. “Besides, you were the one that suggested researching a ‘suspect pool’ last night. Since when do you shoot first, ask questions later?”

“Since now,” Dean says, his voice rising a little.

I bite my tongue before I lash out with harsh words. I ball up my hands into fists until I’m composed enough to ask in a calm, even tone, “Is this because of Halie?” But Dean still takes it the wrong way.

“Why do you say that?” Dean’s voice is hard, louder than normal. “You think I’m going to take you out into unknown territory to search for some chick’s brother so that maybe I can get laid after? Is that what you think?”

I cross my arms over my chest and pout. Yes, I think. But once I stop fuming, something else pushes its way to the front of my mind, past the image of Halie and Dean naked on our motel room bed. He said, ‘Take _me_ out into unknown territory’. There was a slight undertone that meant he cared if I was at risk of being hurt, and he would rather not put me in danger, at least over a stupid reason like sex. I don’t know which way to take the conversation now.

“Well?” Dean prompts.

“I don’t know,” is the best thing I can think of saying.

We don’t talk for the rest of the drive. I’m not sure if he’s mad at me or not, but it’s probably not a good idea to be in the same room when we get to the motel. I plan to just go inside, grab my laptop and my dad’s journal and head to the county library to do some research.

Dean parks the Impala in front of our room. I rush inside and grab my things, shoving them into my backpack haphazardly. I’m already halfway back to the door before Dean walks in. He asks where I’m going.

“To do some research,” I say quietly, without meeting his eyes.

“Want company?” he asks hesitantly.

“Maybe later.” I’m not really upset with Dean, I just have a sour attitude and like to pout all the time. It’s not one of my more endearing qualities.

The library is a couple of blocks from the inn. I cool down maybe five minutes after I leave our room. I really should text Dean, have him pick me up so we could do research together, but I can’t stop thinking about how he got so upset when I suggested we check out local history before gallivanting off into the forest blind.

As usual, I feel guilty for the way I behaved and wish I could take everything back, or at least handle it differently. It seems like things will get a little tense when we’re working, but I have a feeling when this job is over with he and I can get attuned with one another while we search for our next case, then we’ll work together more smoothly.

Then I laugh at myself. Dean invited me on _one_ case. Here I am thinking we’re going to become real hunting partners. So far, there’s nothing I’ve been bringing to the table that would make Dean want me to stick around.

Since Lost Creek is such a small town, it doesn’t take me very long to sift through old newspapers and online records, researching deaths, missing persons, weird activities. Soon I dig up some interesting information, start seeing patterns in things that the police would have never put together because frankly, they had no reason to. Thing is, all of the information I gather is pretty vague. Nothing screams out _paranormal activity_ to me. But then again, that could be why this all went undetected for so long. After all, why would grizzly attacks be periodic? It’s not like bears plan their hunting trips.

Once I have a general idea of the town history, I tackle the pictures and videos that Ben emailed to me. I particularly focus on the very last video Tommy sent and that strange shadow that flashed outside of the tent behind him.

I easily lose track of time. It isn’t until seven that night I realize how deeply absorbed I am. A text message from Dean pulls my mind back to the present. He wants me to meet him at some bar. My stomach grumbles, long and low and a little bit painful. I pack up my stuff and head for the bar, texting Dean along the way to order practically everything on the menu for me.

It’s dark by the time I arrive. When I walk through the door I hear someone break a game of pool and a waitress passes me with a tray of beer and chili cheese fries. I grip my stomach, almost too nauseated to eat.

I spot Dean over in the back corner. He sees me, too, and waves me over. When I’m closer, he spreads his arms out, indicating the lovely array of greasy food set out before him.

“A peace offering,” he says, handing me a mozzarella stick.

I take it and finish it off in two bites. It burns my tongue but at this point I’m so hungry I don’t care. “I’m sorry, too,” I say.

“Did you find anything today?” he asks.

“Yes. But food’s more important right now.” I pull a plate of hot wings toward me and don’t say another word until I’ve eaten four of them.

Dean laughs. “I agree with you there. Want a beer?”

“Sure.”

He waves over a waitress and orders beers for the both of us. I finish off my hot wings, wipe my hands and mouth, and pull out my laptop.

“So, Blackwater Ridge doesn’t get a lot of traffic,” I say, absentmindedly picking at French fries while I talk. “Local campers, mostly. But still, this past April, two hikers went missing out there. They were never found.”

“Any before that?” Dean asks with a mouthful of cheeseburger.

I open my dad’s journal, where I’ve started to add my own notes. I’ve stashed some newspaper clippings there and I give them to Dean to read. “Yeah, in 1981, eight different people all vanished in the same year. Authorities said it was grizzly attacks.”

Dean huffs as he reads the articles in the Lost Creek Gazette.

“Then, it happened again in 1960 and again before that in 1939. Every 21 years, just like clockwork. Check this out.” I turn the laptop so we can both see it. “I played around with Tommy’s video. Watch this.” I have the video open in an editing program. Earlier, I isolated the frames of the video where the shadow was present. I flick through each of them slowly. His body language shifts, he’s suddenly more alert.

“Do it again,” he says.

I hit the first frame and go through once more. “That’s three frames. A fraction of a second. Whatever that thing is, it can _move_.”

Dean punches my arm. “Told you something weird was going on.”

“Yeah,” I grumble, rubbing my arm. I close my laptop and hand over one more newspaper article. “In 1960, one camper survived a supposed grizzly attack. He was just a kid. Barely crawled out of the woods alive.”

“Is there a name?” Dean asks, flipping the article over a few times.

“Just a last name. Shaw.”

“And since you’re so amazingly good at this research stuff, I’m guessing you have an address already?”

I hold up a Post-It note with a smirk. “Of course.”

“All right, let’s go pay this Mr. Shaw a visit,” Dean says.

“Now?” I ask. My eyes scan over all of the food we have left.

Dean tilts his head to the side, his eyebrows raising and his mouth pulling down at the corners. “In a bit,” he finally says. “Can’t let all this good food go to waste.”

We eat and talk and laugh for another half-hour, then we gather our stuff and head out to the car. Mr. Shaw’s house is on the outskirts of town in a secluded, wooded area. It looks particularly eerie at night, with a faint glow in the windows, barely bright enough to pierce the darkness. Dean and I walk to the front door and give our spiel about being with the Park Service and wanting to ask about what happened to him.

Mr. Shaw leads us inside, balancing a cigarette in his mouth while he talks. “Look, rangers, I don’t know why you’re asking me about this. It’s public record.” He takes a long draw on his cigarette. “I was a kid. My parents got mauled by a–”

“Grizzly?” I interrupt. “That’s what attacked them?”

Shaw takes another puff, letting the smoke out slowly through his nose. He nods.

“The other people that went missing that year, those bear attacks too?” Dean asks.

Shaw stays silent.

“If we knew what we were dealing with, we might be able to stop it,” I prompt him.

“I seriously doubt that,” Shaw grumbles as he sits down on a shabby armchair. “Anyways, I don’t see what difference it would make. You wouldn’t believe me. Nobody ever did.”

My heart sort of goes out to the old man. If anyone knows how hard it is to keep a secret so unusual, to cover it up with some plain old story, it’s Dean and I. I sit on the chair in front of Shaw.

“Mr. Shaw, what did you see?” I ask gently.

Shaw just looks at me, breathing hard, apparently contemplating if he wants to tell the truth or not. Eventually, he says, “Nothing. It moved too fast to see. It hid too well. I heard it, though. A roar, like no man or animal I’ve ever heard…”

“It came at night?” I ask.

Shaw nods.

“Got inside your tent?”

“It got inside our _cabin_. I was sleeping in front of the fireplace when it came in. It didn't smash a window or break the door. It unlocked it. Do you know of a bear that could do something like that? I didn't even wake up till I heard my parents screaming.” Shaw shudders at the memory.

“It killed them?” I ask.

“Dragged them off into the night.” Shaw shakes his head. “Why it left me alive…been asking myself that ever since.” His hand reaches for his shirt collar. “It did leave me this, though.” He opens the collar, revealing three long, shiny purplish-red claw marks. The way the skin shriveled up around the wounds makes them look like burns. Dean steps in closer for a better look.

“There’s something evil in those woods,” Shaw says darkly. The tone of his voice makes the little hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand up. “It was some sort of a demon.”

Dean and I exchange nervous glances, communicating with our eyes: Time to get going.

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Shaw,” I say. “We’ll see ourselves out.”

“Spirits and demons don’t have to unlock doors,” Dean whispers urgently to me once we’re outside. “If they want inside, they just go through the walls.”

“So, it’s probably something else. Something corporeal,” I say back in a hushed voice.

“Corporeal?” Dean scoffs. “Excuse me, Webster’s dictionary.”

“Shut up,” I say. “What do you think?”

“The claws, the speed that it moves…” Dean’s voice trails off while he thinks. We’re driving now, getting closer to town. The lights look very inviting. So does the idea of my bed at the inn. Tomorrow morning, we go hunting, and we don’t even know what it is we’re looking for.

“Could be a skinwalker,” Dean suggests. “Maybe a black dog. Whatever we’re talking about, we’re talking about a creature, and it’s _corporeal_.” He nudges my ribs with his elbow, teasing me. “That means we can kill it.”

We arrive back at the inn. After we park, I lean against the side of the Impala and watch Dean. He opens the trunk and the weapons box, propping the lid open with a shotgun. He grabs a few different guns and puts them in a duffel bag. The more items he adds to the bag makes me think about just how much potential this creature has of being way more than we’re prepared for.

As soon as we’re inside I kick off my boots and jump backwards on the bed. I bounce a little bit on the springy mattress. Dean dumps the duffel bag on the table and shrugs out of his leather jacket.

“Hey, could you put my dad’s journal in the bag?” I ask. “We may need it.”

He grunts and tosses the journal on top of the bag. I watch him cross the room with his sweats in hand. He shuts the bathroom door. I listen to his actions. The clacking of his belt as he undoes the buckle, the faint rustle of fabric as his jeans fall to the floor. The tap turns on, then off again. A low swishing sound – brushing his teeth.

I take the few minutes I’ve got before he comes back out to change into my own pajamas. Dean opens the bathroom door and emerges with a pile of clothes in his hands. Again, he’s shirtless. I might have to buy him a couple of plain t-shirts for Christmas so he has something to wear to bed. Seeing him like this is only going to make him more irresistible.

I quickly brush my teeth and wash my face in the bathroom. When I get back, Dean’s lying in bed in the same position he was last night. On his back, arms tucked under his head. His eyes are closed and they don’t open when I kneel on the mattress and sit cross-legged, facing him. I know he’s not asleep, though.

“Are you all right, Dean?” I ask. I take the hair-tie off the end of my braid and work my fingers through my hair. It’s still a bit damp, enough to release the aroma of my shampoo.

“Why do you ask?” He doesn’t open his eyes.

“You just seem…stressed,” I say, the last word coming out very quiet.

Dean inhales deeply. I watch his chest rise and slowly fall as he releases his breath. “Wouldn’t you be stressed if you were going after something and you didn’t know what it was?”

“I think it’s more than that, Dean,” I say, trying to pick my words cautiously. “I don’t remember you being this…tense…before.”

“Well, I’ve changed, and I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

Trying to talk to Dean about anything meaningful is about as productive as talking to a brick wall. Heart-to-heart moments are rare, and this isn’t even one of those moments. I’m just trying to understand him, and I know we won’t be able to work well tomorrow if we don’t get over what’s causing this tension between us. Tension that wasn’t there until we reached Lost Creek.

“Is it about your dad?” I ask, my voice barely higher than a whisper.

Dean rubs his hands over his face and groans. “Everything’s always about my dad.”

I pull my long hair over my shoulder and twist the ends around my fingers anxiously. “I know you’re under a lot of pressure to impress him, this being your first case by yourself and all, but I’m here, Dean. I won’t let you fail.”

Dean’s stiff body slackens. He turns his head towards me, and I think he’s really looking at me by the intensity in his face. I shift my eyes down to my lap and my hair falls around my face. Prolonged eye contact makes me nervous.

But curiosity always fights my nervousness, so I take a peek at him through my lashes. He’s propped up on his elbow, still studying me. Then, much to my disbelief, he apologizes.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“It’s all right, Dean.”

“No, it’s not. Yesterday I said this was supposed to be like the old days, but all we’ve done is argue.” Dean reaches over and tucks my hair behind my ear. The simple action sends intense chills down my spine. “We’re a team here. Sorry I haven’t been a team player.”

I look down at my lap again because I’m blushing, bad. I was just trying to empathize with him, but it sort of feels like we’re inching closer to crossing a line that could lead to many complications in our line of work. But by the way I’ve been internally drooling over his toned body and bright green eyes, part of me doesn’t really care.

“It can still be like the old days,” I say with a smile. “We’ve got a couple of sawed-offs in the bag.”

Dean laughs. Then he clears his throat awkwardly. “Thanks, though. For, uh, caring.”

“No problem. Let’s kick some ass tomorrow. Wouldn’t want to kill your ego with all this _caring_ ,” I say. I shove his shoulder lightheartedly.

“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbles, but I see him smile when he rolls over to turn out the lights. 

That night was the first peaceful sleep I’d had in days.

The next morning, we stop at a local mini mart for gas. I can see Dean leaning casually against the Impala from where I stand in front of the cashier, waiting for my turn to pay for the pump. I rock back and forth on my heels, sort of impatient. I’m ready to get this day started. Started and over with. On my third scan of the inside of the mini mart I notice a large bag of peanut M&M’s, my favorite type of candy, and Dean’s too. I remember when our dads were out on a case together and we were left alone with Sam, they would always bring us back a small bag of peanut M&M’s. Dean and I never admitted to each other that we probably only received this special treat because my dad was caring enough to remember. John Winchester wouldn’t bother with something thoughtful like that. I toss the bag on the counter and hand over the credit card.

Dean doesn’t notice me come up behind him. He’s preoccupied with trying to fit the gas pump into the tank. I put the bag of chocolate on my flat palm and slowly inch it under his arm.

“Right on, I love these!” he exclaims, grabbing the bag. He rips it open and pops a handful of them in his mouth.

“I know,” I say, cupping my hands when Dean offers me some.

“You remember?” He sounds shocked.

“Of course I remember. They’re M&M’s.”

Dean grins. The nozzle of the gas pump clicks. Dean returns the nozzle to the holder and we get in the car.

Blackwater Ridge is about twenty miles into the forest from the main highway. Dean follows a winding dirt road that we could probably tackle in fifteen minutes if we had a Jeep, but instead takes us closer to an hour since we’re basically off-roading with a classic American muscle car.

We clear a small hill in the dirt road and come across a truck with its tailgate open, parked in front of the entrance to a small trail. Ben, Halie and a man that must be the guy Halie hired to find her brother all turn to stare at us. As if seeing an Impala in the forest wasn’t weird enough, the roar of the engine echoes for a few seconds after Dean kills it. Nothing like a grand entrance to start the day.

Dean lugs the duffel bag over his shoulder and we walk up to the small group. “You guys got room for two more?” he asks.

“Who are these guys?” the man asks Halie.

“Apparently, this is all the Park Service could muster up for the search-and-rescue,” she says. Funny how she can sound vexed but still look pleased to see Dean again.

I stomp forward and look around. There are more important things to focus on besides some pathetic attempts at flirting. Now I really can’t wait to find what it is we’re looking for. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it happens to snatch Halie up before we kill it…

“You’re rangers?” the guy asks incredulously.

“That’s right,” Dean says with a grin.

“And you’re hiking out in biker boots and jeans?” Halie asks sarcastically, almost as if she’s finding more reason to doubt our Park Ranger guise.

Dean looks down at himself, then over at Halie’s polar opposite attire. “Well, sweetheart, I don’t do shorts.”

Halie is close enough to me that I can lean over and whisper, “Never criticize the outfit,” without Dean hearing. She glares at me. I laugh and walk away.

“What, you think this is funny?” the man says, misinterpreting my laugh. “It’s dangerous backcountry out there. Her brother might be hurt.”

“Believe me, I know how dangerous this could get,” I say.

Dean takes up a sudden interest in his surroundings when he says, "We just wanna help her find her brother, that’s all.”

“Sorry, but who are _you_?” I ask the man.

“Roy. I’m a hunter.”

My stomach lurches and I look over at Dean. His eyes are as wide as mine.

“Best tracker around,” Roy continues. “Anything you think of, I can track it. Wanna know which way the herd of deer went two weeks ago? I can still find signs of their travel in the dirt. What about how many bears live in a certain area? I can tell you that, too. That’s why Halie here hired me.”

Smug little bastard. At least he’s not _our_ kind of hunter.

We start our hike through the forest, with Roy leading the way. Dean walks behind him, followed by Halie and Ben with me bringing up the rear. I keep my eyes peeled, searching the forest, listening for anything that could help me figure out what we’re up against. The sun switches sides in the sky as we walk on and on and on.

About an hour of silence later, Dean strikes up a conversation with Roy.

“So, Roy, you said this morning you do a little hunting,” he says.

“Yeah, more than a little,” Roy says arrogantly.

“Uh-huh,” Dean says dryly. “What kind of furry critters do you hunt?”

“Mostly buck, sometimes bear.”

“Tell me, did uh, Bambi or Yogi ever hunt you back?”

Roy suddenly lurches forward and grabs Dean by the jacket. I start to run towards them, thinking a fight’s about to break out, but Roy just picks up a stick and pokes at the ground inches away from where Dean’s foot had been. A bear trap snaps shut, slicing the stick in two.

“You should watch where you’re stepping, _ranger_ ,” Roy growls. He resumes his position as lead and walks on.

Dean lets out a small, embarrassed laugh and shrugs one shoulder. “It’s a bear trap.” He looks at me, then the others. He smiles, humiliated, and follows Roy. I hang back and wait for Halie and Ben to go in front of me.

Halie catches up to Dean and grabs his arm. “You didn’t pack any provisions. You guys are carrying a duffel bag. You’re not rangers, so who the hell are you?”

“Concerned citizens,” Dean says in his sarcastically sweet tone.

“Yeah, okay,” Halie says, just as sarcastically.

“And what do you mean I didn’t pack provisions?” he says, pulling out the bag of M&M’s from inside his jacket. He sticks his hand in the bag and walks on, but he turns back and gives me a little wink first. My stomach flutters.

Periodically throughout the day, Roy checks a small handheld GPS system. Maybe six hours into our hike, Roy checks it again, only this time he announces: “This is it. Blackwater Ridge.”

“What coordinates are we at?” I ask.

Roy consults his GPS for a brief moment. “Thirty-five minus one-eleven.”

Dean comes up beside me. He’s quiet for a moment, then: “You hear that?”

“Yeah,” I say, my ears slightly ringing from the pressure of the silence in the forest. “Not even crickets.”

“I’m going to take a look around,” Roy says.

“You shouldn’t go off by yourself,” I tell Roy.

Roy smirks. “That’s sweet. Don’t worry about me. I don’t need some little girl telling me what to do.” He brandishes his shotgun and pushes between Dean and I. Dean makes a grab for him, but I hold him back.

“Don’t,” I say.

Dean nods. “All right, everybody stay together. Let’s go.”

We head deeper into the forest, but now the four of us are actually searching around for any signs of Tommy and the campsite. Not five minutes later, we hear Roy calling.

“Halie! Over here!”

Halie takes off in the direction of Roy’s voice, and Dean, Ben and I run to keep up. The three of us almost crash into her when she comes to a halt all of a sudden.

“Oh, my God,” she whispers, her hands covering her mouth.

Roy found the campsite, all right. What’s left it, anyway. The two tents are torn into bloody shreds and some of the campers’ supplies are scattered around, most of it trashed. There’s no sign of Tommy or his friends anywhere.

“Looks like a grizzly,” Roy mutters.

“Tommy!” Halie calls out. She unbuckles her backpack and lets it fall off her shoulders onto the ground. “Tommy!”

“Shh!” I follow her and grab her shoulder, trying to be as light with my touch as possible. “ _Shh-hh-hh_!” I hiss at her when she opens her mouth to yell again.

“Why?” she asks.

“Something might still be out there,” I say.

“Harley!” Dean’s voice carries from a little ways away, and I roll my eyes, because he should know to be quiet as well. I head over and crouch down next to him. He points along the dirt before us.

“The bodies were dragged from the campsite,” Dean says, indicating the marks behind us. He looks back to where he first pointed to. “But here, the tracks just vanish. That’s weird.”

We stand up. I warily glance around the trees. “I’ll tell you what, that’s no skinwalker or black dog,” Dean says in a low voice.

All I can do is nod, because I have absolutely no feedback at this point. If we were at square one before, we’re at square negative two now.

I follow Dean back to the campsite. We find Halie crouched on the ground, crying, holding a smashed and bloody cell phone. Dean goes over to her.

“Hey, he could still be alive,” he says gently.

Halie throws him a disbelieving look.

“Help!” A voice cries from somewhere out in the forest. “Help!”

We all look around. Roy is the first to spring into action. He heads out in the direction of the voice, the rest of us hot on his trail.

“Help! Somebody!”

We search frantically through the forest, covering as much ground as we can, but there’s no one out there. Instead of looking at the ground, like everyone else, I look up toward the trees. High up on some of the tree trunks are slashes in the bark. I follow the path of the trees with the slashes and suddenly I know what we’re hunting. And it wasn’t a human voice that was calling out for help.

“It seemed like it was coming from around here, didn’t it?” Halie says.

I jog back to the group. “Everybody back to camp,” I order.

One look at my face and Dean knows that I know something. He doesn’t question me; instead he ushers everyone back to the campsite.

“Our packs!” Halie exclaims as soon as the clearing is in view.

What little belongings the five of us brought, most of it Roy’s, is gone by the time we get back. Dean and I carry a small handgun apiece in our waistband. I’m thankful I had the sense to stow my dad’s journal in Dean’s pocket, or else it would have disappeared with our duffel bag, but either way, the guns won’t do much good if I’m right about what’s in the woods.

“So much for my GPS and satellite phone,” Roy grumbles.

“What the hell is going on?” Halie demands, rounding on me, since I was the one who brought us all back here with no pretense.

My mind isn’t entirely on her, though. “It’s smart,” I say, more to Dean than to Halie. “It wants to cut us off so we can’t call for help.”

“You mean someone, some nutjob out there just stole all our gear?” Roy says angrily.

I ignore him and go to Dean. “I need to speak with you. In private.” I lead him a little ways away from the group, then turn to face him when we’re a safe distance away. “Okay, let me see my dad’s journal.”

Dean pulls the journal from his jacket, where he had the M&M’s, giving the impression that he’s just an endless supply of handy tools. Too bad he doesn’t have a flame thrower hidden somewhere in there. I open it and flip through a couple of pages. I know exactly what I’m looking for. I hold the journal out to Dean.

The pages I show him are filled top to bottom, side to side with small, neat writing. On the left page, in between breaks in the writing, is a First Nations-style drawing of a figure on two legs with claws for hands. Dean takes one look at it and scoffs.

“Oh, come on, wendigos are in the Minnesota woods or northern Michigan. I’ve never even heard of one this far west.”

“Think about it, Dean,” I say earnestly, taking the journal back. “The claw marks, the way it can mimic a human voice, the speed it travels at.”

“Great,” Dean says, throwing his hands in the air. He reaches toward the back of his pants and produces the handgun. “Well, then this is useless.”

I hand the journal back to Dean. “We’ve got to get these people to safety.”

“All right, let’s go.” He tucks the journal back in his jacket and we return to the others.

Back at the campsite, I speak loudly to the group. “All right, listen up. It’s time to go. Things have gotten…more complicated.”

“What?” Halie demands, looking furious.

“Kid, don’t worry,” Roy says to me in a patronizing tone. “Whatever’s out there, I think I can handle it.”

“It’s not me I’m worried about,” I say, getting fed up with Roy’s macho brashness. “If you shoot this thing, you’re just going to make it mad. We have to leave. _Now_.”

Roy blows a huff of air out of his nose. “One, you’re talking nonsense. Two, you’re in no position to give anybody orders.”

“We should have never let you come out here in the first place, all right? I’m trying to protect you,” I snap at Roy.

Roy strides up to me until his face is inches from mine. “ _You_ protect _me_? I was hunting these woods when your mommy was still kissing you goodnight.”

“Yeah?” I challenge. I narrow my eyes and speak as harshly as I can. “This thing is a damn near perfect hunter. It’s smarter than you, and it’s going to hunt you down and eat you alive unless we get your stupid, sorry ass out of here.”

Roy begins to lift his hands, presumably to hit me or strangle me or something of the sort, but Dean’s faster, anticipating Roy’s actions. Before Roy’s hands even get higher than his waistline, Dean grabs the front of his jacket and shoves him away from me. He pushes him backward until he’s pinned Roy against a tree.

“Chill out,” Dean growls at him.

“Stop!” Ben suddenly shouts. I raise my eyebrows. This is the first time Ben has spoken the entire day. “Stop it! Everybody just stop. Look, Tommy might still be alive, and I’m not leaving here without him.”

I look at Dean and shake my head slightly. He holds his hands out in a helpless gesture. He’s right. There’s no way we can get Halie and Ben to leave willingly.

“It’s getting late,” Dean says. “This thing is a good hunter in the day, but an unbelievable hunter at night. We’ll never beat it, not in the dark. We need to settle in and protect ourselves.”

“How?” Halie asks.

Now comes the hardest part of the job. Deciding whether or not to tell the person you’re trying to help the truth about what it is you’re protecting them from. Our problem here is that Halie and Ben aren’t stupid. They aren’t going to take some bullshit excuse that Dean or I come up with. But just telling them the truth isn’t enough. It’s getting them to believe it. And that means destroying their safe place by letting them know that monsters exist.

“For starters, we build a campfire,” Dean says.

Dean instructs Halie and Ben to gather firewood but stresses for them to stay within twenty feet of us. Then he and I sit on the ground and go through my dad’s journal, looking for the right sequence of protection symbols to draw around our campsite.

“I think we’re good,” I whisper to Dean. “This looks like a good pattern of symbols. Enough to protect them while we go after the wendigo.”

I take a thick stick and draw a large circle around the fire, leaving us enough room to sit or stand comfortably inside of it. Once we’ve got a perimeter set, Dean and I draw protection symbols along the rim of the circle, copying them from my dad’s journal.

Halie sits on a log inside the circle, one leg crossed over the other. She glares at me in between staring at Dean. I can see her practically salivating when Dean crouches down next to her to draw another symbol. Her eyes stay locked on the firm outline of his butt.

I finish my set of symbols before Dean does. I walk a little ways away from the camp, outside of the circle, and sit down on a large rock with my gun on my lap, even though I know it won’t do me any good. More out of habit, I suppose. I lean back against the tree behind the rock.

“One more time, what are those?” I hear Halie ask Dean.

“Anasazi symbols,” Dean says. “It’s for protection.”

I hear Roy laugh incredulously.

“Nobody likes a skeptic, Roy,” Dean says.

There’s a rhythm of crunching noises behind me, getting progressively louder as they approach. Dean appears and sits down on the rock. He nudges me with the side of his body.

“You wanna tell me what’s going on in that freaky head of yours?” he asks.

“Dean, I’m f–”

“No, you’re not fine,” he says, cutting me off. “You’re like a powder keg today. It’s not like you. I’m was always the belligerent one, remember?”

I smile. “I’m a lot more like you than you think.”

“Still, you gotta be more careful. Guys like Roy have no problem kicking a girl’s ass.”

“You don’t think I can take him?” I say, raising my eyebrows and gripping my gun.

“I’m pretty sure you’d beat the bastard to a pulp,” Dean says. He laughs once, then his face turns soft. “I just don’t want you hurt, all right?”

“Dean, we hunt wendigos and shapeshifters and evil spirits. Getting hurt is basically in our job description.”

“Yeah, you’re right, but it would be dumb to get hurt over something stupid like arguing with a misogynistic asshole.”

“Ah, so I’m not the only one who picked up on that,” I mutter. Then I sigh, feeling suddenly tired even though this night is just beginning. I rest my head on Dean’s shoulder.

“You okay?” he asks.

“I just can’t seem to wind down,” I say quietly. “I think it’s because I’ve been avoiding processing the fact that my dad’s gone.”

“I didn’t know how you felt about that, so I never brought it up. I don’t mind if you want to talk about it.”

“Thanks,” I say. “Right now is probably not the best time, though.”

As if the universe agrees with me, a twig snaps loudly in the distance. Dean and I are on our feet in an instant, guns raised in one hand, flashlights held under the gun with the other.

The same voice from earlier, the voice I now know is the wendigo, yells out, “Help me! Please!” I shine my flashlight through the trees, looking frantically for signs of movement. “Help!” the wendigo cries again.

Dean goes back to the campsite. I follow him slowly, facing the woods as I walk.

“He’s trying to draw us out,” Dean tells the others. “Just stay cool, stay put.”

“Inside the magic circle?” Roy says sardonically, waving his shotgun around the perimeter of the camp.

“Help! Help m–”

The screams for help are cut off by a loud growling that comes from directly behind Roy. Roy swivels around, gun raised. “Okay, that’s no grizzly.”

Leaves rustle in the bushes, but then something rushes through the brush, around the border of the circle, toward Halie. She shrieks at the top of her lungs.

“It’s here,” I say quietly. Dean glances at me, talking to me with his eyes. We know what we’re hunting now, but we might not have the resources to kill it.

Halie screams again as something scuttles behind her, unseen in the darkness. Roy points his gun at the trees behind her and shoots. Roy pulls the trigger again, aiming a little bit farther to the left. This time there’s an angry growl, then silence.

“I hit it!” Roy shouts excitedly. He runs past Halie into the forest.

“Roy, no!” Dean yells. “Roy!”

Silence.

Dean points a stern finger at Halie and Ben. “Don’t move,” he says through gritted teeth. He and I run after Roy.

“It’s over here! It’s in the tree!” Roy shouts.

I shine my flashlight around, illuminating the still, quiet trees. There’s no use looking any further. “It took him,” I whisper.

“Let’s get back to camp before it comes back,” Dean says.

When we’re in sight, Halie gets to her feet. “Where’s Roy?”

Dean and I share an uncomfortable look. “The wendigo has him,” Dean reluctantly says.

“The what?” Halie asks with a frown.

“It’s…ah…it’s what we’re hunting.”

Halie slumps back down on the log and puts her face in her hands. “Oh, God, this can’t be real.”

“There’s not much we can do now, but we’re safe inside the circle,” I say. “Might as well get some sleep. Dean and I will keep watch.”

“I don’t mind taking a shift,” Halie offers eagerly.

“Just get some rest,” Dean tells her.

Halie narrows her eyes and sits on the ground next to Ben. They lay down in the dirt. Dean and I go back to the same rock we were sitting on a little while ago.

“That thing’s got to be keeping Roy and the others somewhere around here,” Dean says.

“I was thinking that, too. We can look for it in the morning.” I yawn. “Crap.”

“Come sit down here.” He guides me to the ground. I lean against his legs and he gently gathers all of my hair and piles it on his lap. I didn’t bother to braid it this morning, I just left it loose, so it’s probably all knotted. Dean doesn’t seem to mind. He runs his fingers through my hair, starting at the ends, working his way to my scalp.

I never planned on falling asleep, no matter how tired I got, but I became so relaxed sitting there with Dean playing with my hair that when I closed my eyes for what felt like a moment, it turned out to be a couple of hours.

I sit straight up, looking around in the dark woozily. “Dammit, Dean, why did you let me fall asleep?” I grumble.

“Because you needed it.”

“Your turn, then.” I stand up, yawn, and stretch out my arms, my back, my legs. I look over at the campsite. Halie and Ben are curled up next to each other by the dying fire. I’m glad they’re able to sleep.

“I’m not tired,” Dean says.

“Too bad.” We trade spots. Despite his protests of sleep, I can tell he’s tired. I stroke his hair like I did the other night.

“I could feel you last time, when you were doing this,” Dean says sleepily. “It felt nice. Feels nice now.”

“Shh,” I say soothingly.

I jerk awake, the sun blinding me when I open my eyes. Dean is still asleep on my lap. I can’t believe I dozed off. Dean and I aren’t even inside the fucking circle. The wendigo could have taken us at any time during the night. Some lookout I am.

Dean groans and rubs his eyes. “Is it time to kill some wendigo now?” he says groggily.

I laugh. “Morning, sunshine. Let’s get back in the circle. We’ve been out here too long.”

We walk back and wake up Ben and Halie, who reluctantly sits up against the log. I take my dad’s journal and sit on the border of the circle, pretending to read up on the wendigo while I listen to Dean and Halie’s conversation.

“How are you holding up?” he asks her.

“I’m still trying to figure out if last night was a dream,” she says. “I don’t…I mean, these types of things, they aren’t supposed to be real.”

“I wish I could tell you different.”

“How do we know it’s not out there watching us?” Halie asks.

“We don’t,” Dean says. “But we’re safe for now.”

“How do you know about this stuff?”

Dean is silent for a moment. “Kind of runs in the family,” he says finally.

“Is she your sister, then?” Halie asks, feigning innocent curiosity.

Dean gives a little incredulous laugh before saying, “Uh, no. Hah. She’s not my sister. She’s a very good, very close friend.”

I fight the urge to glance up from the journal and see the look on Halie’s face. I guess I have to start giving Dean a little more credit.

Neither of them say anything. I let Halie stew in her embarrassment for a few minutes before I get up, dad’s journal in hand, and rescue Dean.

“So we’ve got half a chance of getting this thing in the daylight,” I say. “And I, for one, want to kill this evil son of a bitch.”

“Well, hell, you know I’m in,” Dean says enthusiastically. He takes my dad’s journal, then faces it toward the three of us sitting on the log. “All right, kids, history lesson." He points to the figure on the page. “‘Wendigo’ is a Cree Indian word. It means ‘evil that devours’. Wendigos are hundreds of years old. Each one was once a man. Sometimes an Indian, or other times a frontiersman or a miner or hunter.”

“How does a man turn into one of those things?” Halie asks.

“Well, it’s always the same,” I say. “During some harsh winter a guy finds himself starving, cut off from supplies or help. He becomes a cannibal to survive, eating other members of his tribe or camp.”

“Like the Donner Party,” Ben says.

I nod. Dean pokes around the litter on the ground, gathering a couple of random items. I wonder what sort of plan he’s cooking up.

“Cultures all over the world believe that eating human flesh gives a person certain abilities,” I continue. “Speed, strength, immortality.”

“If you eat enough of it, over years, you become this less than human thing. You’re always hungry.” Dean drops an armful of odds and ends into a pile at my feet.

“So if that’s true, how can Tommy still be alive?” Halie asks.

“You’re not gonna like it,” Dean says.

“Tell me,” she demands.

Dean and I exchange glances before he reluctantly says, “More than anything, a wendigo knows how to last long winters without food. It hibernates for years at a time, but when it’s awake it keeps its victims alive. It, uh, stores them, so it can feed whenever it wants. If your brother’s alive, it’s keeping him somewhere dark, hidden, and safe. We gotta track it back there.”

“And then how do we stop it?” Halie asks.

“Well, guns are useless,” I say.

“So are knives,” Dean says. “Basically–” He crouches down and picks up a half empty can of lighter fluid and a beer bottle from the pile at my feet. He looks up at me, grinning wide “–we gotta torch the sucker.”

Dean quickly assembles a crude Molotov cocktail. Without wasting any time, we head off into the forest. To be honest, I have no idea where we’re going. We start heading in the direction we thought Roy disappeared from, but from there, I have no clue. We just keep on walking and hope that Halie or Ben don’t ask questions.

A couple of miles into our morning hike, I notice more claw marks on the tree bark. This time, there’s blood in them. I walk ahead, faster than the others, following the marks. They lead me slightly off of the path we were on.

“Dean,” I call.

He catches up to me. “What is it?”

I point at the trees. “You know, I was thinking, those claw prints, so clear and distinct…they were almost too easy to follow. I saw some yesterday. That’s how I figured out it was a wendigo.”

No sooner had I finished talking, a loud growling echoes around us. I whip around, scanning the area quickly. Branches and leaves rustle above our heads. I notice Halie back up into a tree trunk, frightened, then glance down at her shoulder. She touches her shirt, then shifts her head up. A scream so loud comes from her mouth it hurts my ears. Damn, she can scream. But she has a good reason to.

Halie leaps to the side and lands on the dirt just as a body falls from above. Roy lands where she had been standing a moment ago. Dean and I go over to examine the lifeless body. He crouches down and pokes at Roy’s head.

“His neck’s broken,” he says.

The growling starts up again. This time it sounds like it’s coming from all around us. Dean straightens up. “Okay, run!” he shouts. “Run, go, go, go!”

The four of us take off at a sprint, racing through the trees. Dean takes a sharp turn down around a small rock quarry and Halie follows, but Ben took the corner too fast and trips over some roots on the ground. I help him up.

“Come on, I got you,” I say. “We gotta move.”

We continue to run. Again, somewhere in the distance, Halie screams. Her voice sounds too far away, and too far to the left, to be where her and Dean should be.

I stop running when I see a shattered beer bottle on the ground. Dean’s Molotov cocktail. “Oh, no,” I mutter. I look around and listen, but I hear nothing, see nothing. “ _Dean!_ ”

“It has them, doesn’t it?” Ben asks me. All I can do is nod while a sick, acidy feeling bubbles up in my stomach.

Ben and I continue to walk. I don’t speak because my mind is completely occupied with the thought of Dean captured by a monster. This is why hunters prefer to work alone. If you’re teamed up with someone you care about and that person gets into trouble, you lose focus, you don’t think or act rationally. But I have to pull myself together because I _cannot_ lose Dean.

Ben finally breaks the silence. “If it keeps its victims alive, why would it kill Roy?”

“I think because Roy shot at it. Pissed it off,” I say.

Silence again.

Ben suddenly stops and bends over to pick something up off the ground. “They went this way,” he said. He drops a couple of M&M’s into my hand.

I hold them out, staring at the three glorious little chocolates on my palm, and laugh. Buying those M&M’s yesterday was the best decision I ever made.

“It’s better than breadcrumbs,” I whisper. Of course Dean would find a way to communicate with me. He’s not the kind of guy to go down without a fight.

We follow the candy trail for about a mile until we come to a run-down mine entrance. A worn-out sign reads: WARNING! DANGER! DO NOT ENTER! EXTREMELY TOXIC MATERIAL! I look at Ben, shrug, and duck my head to go inside. Ben follows me.

When we can no longer see using the light from behind us, I turn on my flashlight and point it ahead of us. It’s cold and damp and it smells repulsive inside the old mine. We come across a fork in the tunnel. Just as I’m about to pick a path, a low grumbling sound reverberates off the dirt walls. I click off the flashlight, push Ben against the wall and cover his mouth before he can scream. Seconds later, the wendigo stalks past us in the dark, taking the opposite tunnel of the one I was going to choose. It’s too dark to make out more than its shadow.

I release Ben, but I keep a finger to his lips, silently telling him to be quiet. We don’t move until I feel the wendigo has gone far enough. The dirt ground turns into floorboards up ahead and they creak under our feet as we walk. The old wood doesn’t hold up with both of us on it, though, and the floorboards collapse. Ben and I fall through the floor and land a few feet down on a pile of bones and broken wood.

Dust and dirt billow around us. I cough and wave my hand in front of my face, trying to clear the air. Ben turns his head and comes face-to-face with a pile of cobweb-ridden skulls. He squirms around, whimpering in fear. I crawl over to him.

“Hey, it’s okay, its o–”

Something a few feet away catches my eye. I squint in the darkness, feeling for my flashlight. I turn it on and point it away from me. The light illuminates Dean, hanging by his wrists from the ceiling.

“Dean!” I gasp. I run to him and grab his face. My left hand smears something wet along his cheek. It’s blood oozing from a gash. His eye is swollen and purple around the rim as well. “Dean! Dean, wake up!”

Halie is tied up next to Dean. Ben must have noticed her because the whimpering stops and he calls out her name. I give Dean a slight shake. His head rolls to the side and he groans a little.

“Hey, you okay?” I ask.

Dean opens his eyes and groans louder. “Yeah.”

I take out my pocket knife. He winces the entire time I saw through his binds. When his weight is no longer supported by the rope, he immediately slumps down. I try to catch him, but he’s too heavy and we end up in a heap on the floor. Dean grimaces and clamps his mouth shut, trying not to yell out in pain.

“Sorry,” I say. I can’t contain myself any longer. I throw my arms around him. “I thought I lost you. You sure you’re all right?”

“Yeah, yep,” he says in a strained voice. “Where is he?”

“He’s gone for now.” I toss Ben my knife and he cuts Halie down. She’s in better condition than Dean, proving that Dean did whatever he could to protect her.

Halie rubs her wrists and looks around in the dark. “Tommy?” she says quietly. Suddenly she’s crying. I shine my flashlight in her direction. Another person hangs there, suspended by ropes around his wrists. I recognize his face from the videos. Tommy. He looks terrible. Dead, even. Halie touches his cheek and Tommy’s head jerks up. She jumps back with a shriek.

“Cut him down!” she tells Ben. He jumps and hacks at the ropes tying up Tommy. The two of them support their brother once he’s free.

“We’re gonna get you home,” Halie says in a soothing tone.

Dean pokes my arm and points to the corner of the room. I direct my flashlight at it. The stolen supplies from the boys’ camp are piled in the corner, as well as the things the wendigo stole from us. I help Dean stand up and we pick through the supplies.

“Check it out,” Dean says. He holds up two guns with overly-large barrels.

“Flare guns. Those’ll work,” I say with a grin.

Dean laughs and twirls the guns around his fingers. “Come on, guys, let’s go,” he says.

After giving the cave a quick once-over in search of Tommy’s camping buddies – which we don’t find – we head down a tunnel, Dean and I leading. Halie and Ben support a limping Tommy. We don’t get very far before more growling resonates through the tunnels.

“Looks like someone’s home for supper,” Dean says.

“We’ll never outrun it,” Halie says, fear creeping into her voice.

Dean looks back at the Collins’s, then over to me. I don’t like the expression on his face. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Yeah, I think so,” I say grudgingly. He plans on being a distraction so we can escape.

“All right, listen to me,” Dean says to the siblings. “Stay with Harley. She’s gonna get you out of here.”

“What are you going to do?” Halie asks.

Dean winks at me and heads the opposite way down the tunnel, yelling, “Chow time, you freaky bastard! Yeah, that’s right, bring it on, baby! I’m feeling _good!”_

“All right, come on! Hurry!” I say.

Halie, Ben and Tommy follow me down the tunnel. I hear Dean yell again, from farther away this time. “Hey! Hey, you want some white meat, bitch! I’m right here!”

The good part about these types of situations is that adrenaline pumps so hard and fast through my body that most of the time I’ve got no room to be scared. But when the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up, I start to feel the fear. Fear that we’re being followed.

The wendigo growls from behind us. It’s still a little ways down the tunnel, swathed in the shadows. I point my flare gun in that direction, then lower it.

“Get him out of here,” I tell Halie and Ben sternly.

“Harley, no,” Ben says.

“Go!” I shout, and raise the gun again. I stand firm, keeping my eyes on the target like my dad taught me to, even though at the moment I can’t really see my target. “Come on, come on,” I mutter as my heart beats faster.

Suddenly, the growling comes from behind me. I spin around, coming face to face with the wendigo. The thing is abhorrent. Dirty, pale skin stretches out too thin over a disfigured skull, and the rest of its body, for that matter. Its lipless mouth pulls back over its sharp teeth with a snarl. It raises a long, heavy clawed hand and knocks me back, but I still shoot and, unfortunately, miss. There goes my flare gun. I scramble to my feet and take off sprinting down the tunnel.

“Come on, hurry!” I shout at the Collins’s when I’ve caught up with them. “Run!”

We turn the corner and come to a dead end. My stomach drops. I turn around and face the oncoming wendigo.

“Get behind me,” I order the others.

The wendigo advances on us slowly, taking its time. It knows we’re trapped, that we’ve got nowhere to go…

“Hey!”

The wendigo turns around. Dean appears behind it and shoots it in the stomach. The flare goes off inside the wendigo and he bursts into flames, screaming and wailing in pain as his body falls to a pile of burning bones on the floor. The stench of a hundred rotting bodies fills the cave, intensified by the heat of the fire that crackles as it licks the bones.

Dean looks at me with the biggest grin on his face. The light from the flames on the dead wendigo play on his skin as he bobs his head a little. “Not bad, huh?”

I smile at him, shaking my head incredulously.

It’s a long, slow journey back to the dirt road where the Impala and Roy’s truck are parked. Being fatigued and hiking through the forest is bad enough under normal circumstances, but I have to add lightheadedness and intense hunger to the list of bad things I feel on the walk back.

Halie and Ben load Tommy into the back seat of Roy’s truck, then Halie climbs in after him. Ben rides shotgun while I drive the truck, following Dean all the way to the Ranger Station. Dean must have called ahead because when we pull into the parking lot, an ambulance is there waiting next to a couple of cop cars.

The paramedics take Tommy and strap him to a gurney. The police question us. I went over a cover story with Halie and Ben on the ride over, instructing them to say that they were attacked by an eight-hundred-pound grizzly bear and to tell Tommy to simply say, “I don’t remember anything.”

I sit on the hood of the Impala and watch Dean get stitched up by the paramedics. He tried to refuse, like usual, but there was a gash on the back of his head that was bleeding too much for him to ignore. I’m surprised he made it back to the cars, to be honest. He couldn’t get out of the bandages, but he managed to weasel his way out of going to the hospital. That one he couldn’t manage getting sucked in to. Fake I.D.’s, no insurance. It’s a train wreck waiting to happen.

Dean walks over to me and grins.

“What?” I say.

“We did it,” he says. “Another one bites the dust.”

I groan. “Thanks, Dean. Now I’m going to have that stupid song stuck in my head.”

Dean laughs and hums the chorus. I punch him in the arm. He leans against the hood next to me and we watch as the ambulance drives away, the lights and sirens fading into the distance.

“Man, I hate camping,” Dean says.

“So do I.”

Dean and I both take in a big, deep breath and exhale at the same time. We look at each other and laugh quietly. Dean keeps eye contact with me and for some reason I can’t turn away. I’ve been in this moment before. Butterflies in the stomach, the silence where you try to figure out if the other person wants what you want.

Dean’s phone rings, breaking the trance we both started slipping into. I look down and clear my throat, tucking my hair behind my ear. Dean digs the phone out of his pocket and answers it. Wrong number. Spec-freaking-tacular.

I try not to dwell on it too much but I swear, I _swear_ I saw the tiniest movement in Dean’s body right before the phone rang. A tiny movement that might have started to bring him closer to me, bring his face and lips down to meet mine. I guess I’ll never know.


	3. Bloody Mary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mixed in with the Bloody Mary case is an exploration of Dean and Harley's relationship, a small glimpse into their childhood, and a dark secret from Harley's past.
> 
> Looking back on this stuff now, I just want to facepalm every time I re-read my stuff. I'm so corny it's annoying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Duane - if you ever get to this chapter, after the fight at the end it's basically just porn. feel free to skip ahead, cuz that might get awkward looool

The next couple of days are spent on the road. We don’t bother searching for place to stay at night. We just sleep in the Impala. The front seat is a bench seat and the back is incredibly roomy, so the car makes for a decent bed in times of need.

Dean and I have a sort of unspoken agreement that we would continue on together. There’s nowhere in particular for us to go at the moment, but we’re heading east. I’ll most likely do some nationwide searches for any suspicious events or deaths the next time we stay someplace with access to the Internet. Or Dean will just browse through obituaries in a newspaper.

After our defeat of the wendigo in Colorado, Dean was excited to tell his dad the story. I encouraged Dean to call him despite the things he told me at the inn. So I guess it’s partly my fault that Dean’s hurting right now, even though he’s hiding it. His dad won’t answer the phone.

The car rides consist of loud rock music and little talking. Dean is probably just trying to drown out his thoughts. The music doesn’t bother me, but at the same time I’ve got my own issues to work through, and some peace and quiet would be nice once in a while.

I know that there’s five stages of grief or whatever, but I don’t think I quite fit the mold for that. I was never in denial over my dad’s death – I watched it happen, I salted and burned his body. I haven’t had a chance to be angry about it. I mean, I’m angry that we were so careless and bested by a demon, but I _killed_ that demon. That’s never even been heard of before. I got my revenge.

I love my dad, but I know he’s gone and there’s nothing I can do to bring him back, which is why I’m past the bargaining stage, too. Maybe once in a while I ask myself if there’s something I could have done to save him, but that’s the closest I’ve gotten. Depression doesn’t really seem like a fair stage, because there’s a lot more to depression than being sad over the loss of a loved one. I still know there’s jobs to be done, people to save, so even though I’m miserable I know my dad would want me to continue our work. Acceptance is a pretty lame stage, too. It seems like once you get past the denial part, you should be able to accept the death.

So that leaves me to wonder why I still feel the way I do.

Maybe I am depressed, because I can’t describe the way I feel, but I know there’s an overall gloominess surrounding me. I’ve been on the go since my dad was killed. These car rides are the first chance I’ve had to think about nothing but him. I don’t know what to think, though.

Numb. Maybe that’s the word I’m looking for.

We’re somewhere off Route 15 near Belleville, Illinois when Dean suddenly pulls the car over to the side of the road and kills the engine. He doesn’t speak. He just stares out of the windshield. There’s no need to question his actions. If he wants to explain he will. I just rest my head against the back of the seat and wait for him to either say something or continue driving.

“Why the hell do I bother?” he says quietly after a few minutes. It sounds like he’s talking to himself. I listen anyway in case he wants a response from me. “I don’t know what I expected from him. I don’t know why I thought he’d care.”

After I’ve let a respectable amount of silence pass, I decide to say, just as quietly, “Because he’s your dad and you love him. And you respect him, which is why you still do what he asks.”

Dean presses his lips together firmly. He tilts his head forward until it touches the steering wheel. He stays like that for a long time. I finally reach out and put my hand on his shoulder. He still doesn’t move, not for a while.

“I’ve been so wrapped up in me that I forgot to ask how you’re doing,” he says to the steering wheel. “About your dad, I mean,” he adds hesitantly.

“I’m…dealing.” I sigh and take my hand back. Dean finally looks up. “I’m not ignoring the fact that I lost him, but already I’m not as broken up about it as I was a week ago. Has this job made me that heartless?”

“You’re strong, Harley, not heartless.” He chuckles sadly, like he thinks the same should be said for him. “You’re a hunter.”

I nod. Dean starts the car and we drive off in silence. I may have lost my dad, but it must be harder when your dad’s still alive and he’s either not around or doesn’t treat you the best. There’s no doubt in my mind that John loves Dean, it’s just that John doesn’t have his priorities straight. He’s been so consumed by grief and revenge that he forgot his sons come first. My dad reminded me of that a lot.

The sun shone bright in the clear blue sky all day until now. Dean seems to show some signs of life as dark clouds collect overhead. I notice him look out of the window expectantly.

“You like the rain?” I ask him.

“Of course,” he says. “But not in the lame way that chicks like it.”

“Hey, watch it. I like the rain and it’s not for those stupid reasons.”

“Oh, come on,” Dean says. “The reason you like the rain isn’t so you could stay inside by a fire drinking tea or hot chocolate or some floofy crap? Maybe with a guy?”

“I drink bourbon,” I sniff.

Dean raises his eyebrows, then smirks after a moment.

“I don’t have to try to be happy when the weather’s gloomy,” I say in a low voice. Then, after moment, I add, “And I don’t exactly have a house to do the other stuff in...”

“I knew it!” Dean shouts. “You do like that romantic crap.”

“Can’t know what I’ve never had,” I say sharply.

“Can’t argue with you there.” He points ahead of us. “See those lights? Maybe we’re coming up on a town. We should stop somewhere for the night. I’m tired of sleeping all scrunched up in the car like a freakin’ sardine.”

“Yeah, and I’m hungry anyway,” I say.

Dean is almost right about the upcoming town. It’s more of a pit-stop type area with the usual amenities. Gas stations, a couple of fast-food places, one run down motel with a flashing _Vacancy_ sign. We glance at each other with a “Well, we’ve had worse” look.

“You want to get the room while I grab some food?” I ask.

“Sure,” Dean says.

He reaches for his pocket, no doubt to offer a card to pay again, but I hold up my hand to stop him and pull out my wallet. “My dad and I ran a couple of scams on our own, you know,” I say, smirking.

Dean laughs and we part ways. Everything is pretty much within walking distance. While I wait for my order at _Taco Train_ , Dean texts me a room number.

Carrying the food is a little less convenient than I thought. I guess they don’t have bags in Illinois. When I get to the door of room 10, I knock with my foot instead of risking dropping everything. Dean opens the door and sniffs.

“Ooh, what did you get?” he asks, grabbing the three cartons on top of the big box in my hands. “Did you bring me some pie?”

“You didn’t ask for pie,” I say. Dean pouts. “It’s Mexican food.”

“Sweet.” Dean opens the lid on the big box in my hands. “Mmm, looks good. Not as good as pie, though.”

“Cool it with the pie. If you want some next time, let me know before I get the food.”

Dean wrinkles his nose. He sets everything up on the table while I look around the room and shrug out of my jacket. It’s definitely cheaper than the inn, like the owners really don’t put much effort into sprucing up the place because they know they’re the only motel around for miles and if people want to stop, this is their only choice.

The quality of the room doesn’t bother me though. What makes my heart sink just a fraction of an inch is the sight of two separate twin beds.

“Hey Harley, they didn’t give you plates?” Dean asks, distracting me from my thoughts.

“Oh, I guess not. There’s a couple of spoons, though.” I grab my laptop and join Dean at the table. At least there’s internet here. Dean stuffs the remains of a taco into his mouth, polishing off two of the twelve I bought, and digs into the container of rice.

I set up my laptop and wait for it to turn on while I begin to eat. “I was thinking we should look for another case,” I tell him. “It’s been long enough. Maybe there’s something here in Illinois.”

“Maybe,” Dean says.

When my laptop is up and running, I pull up a national police database that I hacked into a few years ago. That’s usually how I found most of the cases for my dad and I if we weren’t getting tips from other hunters or calls from old friends asking for help, or simply looking at different newspapers from across the country.

“Anything?” Dean asks.

“A couple died in a car crash on Route 161 near here last week,” I say, skimming through a police report. “It’s the second fatal crash within a mile of the first in two months.”

Dean hands me the container of rice. “Does it say what caused the crash?”

I sigh after getting to the end of the report. “The first one was a guy driving with a severed brake line and the second looks like the couple collided with a deer and ran off the side of a cliff.” I slump back in my chair. “Not our type of deal.”

I browse through a couple more reports in different states. Two kids went missing in Arkansas. There were a couple of storms in Minnesota. One really odd construction accident in Georgia. I get frustrated with the lack of possibilities. I’m about to give up for the night when I notice a new report pop up from Toledo, Ohio.

“Dean, check this out. A man in Ohio was found dead in his bathroom by his daughter.”

“And?”

I grin. “And both of his eyes looked like they exploded in his head.”

Dean raises his eyebrows. “Now that sounds like our kind of thing. Where in Ohio?”

“Toledo.” I switch tabs on the internet page, opening the map centered around northeastern America. “It’s about two hundred miles from here.”

“We’ll leave in the morning. Shouldn’t take us long to get there,” Dean says.

I agree with him. We spend the rest of our time eating speculating about the different things that could have caused this guy’s eyes to burst and bleed out of his head.

Later that night, I lay in bed and try not to think about how I was so uncomfortable with the thought of Dean and I in the same bed last week when now I’d give anything for him to be beside me. I sigh and roll onto my stomach. There’s no use dreaming about stuff like that. I’ve got to keep myself emotionally detached from Dean so we can do our job without any extra risks.

In the morning, Dean and I eat leftover tacos and beans for breakfast, fill up the car with gas, and we’re on the road by nine. Dean seems a bit happier, too. Maybe now that we’ve got a possible case he can stop dwelling on his issues with his dad. At least for the meantime.

“So the local newspaper is called _The Toledo Blade_ ,” I tell Dean. “As soon as we reach the city we should probably get a few back copies if they have any.”

“When did the guy die?” Dean asks.

“A couple of days ago. On the twenty-eighth, I think.” Hmm, almost October. My stomach lurches. My birthday is on Halloween. I never really cared about celebrating, but this will be my first birthday without my dad. _It’s just another day,_ I tell myself. _Just do your job._

The scenery doesn’t change much from Illinois to Indiana, but Ohio definitely looks a little different. It’s less industrialized along the border. Toledo is farther north, almost to Michigan. The closer we get to Lake Erie, the more excited I get. Once this case is done I’m going to ask Dean if we can drive to the lake. In my entire life of crisscrossing the country with my dad, I’ve never been north, south, east or west enough to see the ocean or the Great Lakes.

“Welcome to Toledo, Ohio,” Dean says when we reach a small town. It’s cold here, almost like it’s ready to rain or snow. I pull my jacket tight around me.

“There’s a gas station up ahead,” I point out. “Let’s get some newspapers.”

I was right to think to check the papers because we find an obituary for Steven Shoemaker, our dead man. I read the article aloud.

“‘ _The Shoemaker family is sad to announce the sudden death of their beloved husband and father Steven Shoemaker. Steven was forty-six. A short service will be held on Wednesday, October first at two o’clock p.m. at the Toledo house._ ’” I look at Dean. “Guess we’re crashing a service?”

“You bet.”

It’s only noon, so we drive around for a while, exploring the town. We pass a hospital along the way, get a room at a small hotel, find the address for the Shoemaker house. A little before one, Dean doubles back and heads for the hospital. A good way to kill time would be getting inside the morgue to see the body.

After a med student impersonation, verbal finagling, and eventually just full on bribing the morgue tech, we get to see Shoemaker’s body. There’s absolutely nothing worth seeing, except the eerie, hollow eye sockets. The morgue tech says Shoemaker’s eyes liquified, but it looks like they were burned out of his skull. Neat.

The official cause of death hasn’t been reported yet, but the doctor is leaning towards a massive stroke or aneurysm, due to the outrageous amount of blood in the skull. Either way, there aren’t any signs of struggle or indication that someone did this to Shoemaker.

“Might not be one of ours after all,” I tell Dean as we climb into the Impala. “Might just be some freak medical thing.”

“How many times in our long and varied career has it actually been a freak medical thing and not some sign of an awful supernatural death?” Dean asks cynically.

“Almost never,” I say reluctantly.

“Exactly.” He pulls out onto the main street. “All right, let’s go talk to the daughter.”

The street that the Shoemaker’s live on is lined with cars on either side. We end up parking a street over and walking. I look at each house that we pass. They’re nice places. Two-story, porch, green lawn. Makes me think about what Dean and I talked about yesterday, how I mentioned not having a place where I could do something as simple as light a fire in the fireplace.

“What are you thinking about?” Dean asks me.

“Just how nice this neighborhood is.”

“Growing up in a place like this would freak me out.”

“Why?”

“Well, manicured lawns. ‘How was your day, honey?’ I’d blow my brains out.”

“There’s nothing wrong with normal,” I tell him.

“I’d take our life over normal any day.”

A growing sadness flows through me as I think about how Dean could never accept a home. Probably because he’s never had one – he wouldn’t know how to accept it. I had a home once, but that was destroyed a long time ago.

The front door of the Shoemaker house is open. There are quite a few people here, the men dressed in black suits and the women in dark dresses. Dean and I glance at each other’s casual jeans-and-t-shirt attire.

“Feel like we’re underdressed,” Dean mutters.

I laugh quietly and we walk through the house towards the back yard, where more people are gathered. I ask someone where I can find Steven Shoemaker’s daughters. He directs us over to a table where four girls sit. Three of them look like they’re in high school. The last, a lot younger.

We stop in front of the table and Dean addresses the high school girl with dark, cropped hair and a somber expression. She has her arm around the young blond girl.

“You must be Donna, right?”

“Yeah,” she says, raising her head to look at us.

“Hi,” I say. “Uh, we’re really sorry.” I’ve never been good with condolences. “I’m Harley, this is Dean. We worked with your dad.”

Donna exchanges an odd glance with the girl to her right. She looks back at Dean and I. “You did?”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “This whole thing. I mean, a stroke.” He shakes his head sullenly.

“I don’t think she really wants to talk about this right now,” the girl next to Donna says defensively.

“It’s okay,” Donna reassures her. “I’m okay.”

“Did your dad have any symptoms?” Dean asks. “Dizziness? Migraines?”

“No,” Donna says, looking confused and a little bit annoyed.

The little girl shakes off Donna’s arm. “That’s because it wasn’t a stroke,” she says defiantly.

“Lily, don’t say that,” Donna scolds her.

Lily shakes her head violently. “No, it happened because of me.”

“Sweetie, it didn’t.” Donna tries to stroke Lily’s hair but Lily just ducks out of the way and moves to another chair.

“Lily,” I say gently. She looks up at me with large, sad eyes. I kneel down in front of her. “Why would you say something like that?”

“Right before he died, I said it,” she says.

“You said what?”

Lily looks afraid. “Bloody Mary,” she whispers. “Three times in the bathroom mirror.” She covers her face with her hands. “She took his eyes, that’s what she does.”

“That’s not why Dad died,” Donna says, trying to comfort Lily again. She doesn’t seem entirely enthused that I encourage Lily’s story. “This isn’t your fault.”

“I think your sister’s right, Lily,” Dean says slowly. “There’s no way it could have been Bloody Mary. Your dad didn’t say it, did he?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Lily says. A slight flicker of relief crosses her face.

“See, then it couldn’t be your fault,” I say with a soft smile.

Lily nods and smiles a little too, before she starts to cry. I spring to my feet and back up into Dean. He grabs my arm.

“Let’s go. I can’t handle crying kids,” he whispers. Without a second glance, he scuttles back towards the house.

I look back at the girls and say, “Again, I’m sorry,” before running after Dean.

After a small debate over our next move, we head upstairs to check out the bathroom where the body was found. When we’re out of earshot of anyone in the house, Dean says, “It was totally Bloody Mary.”

I push open the bathroom door and look around before going inside. There’s still some dried blood on the floor. “The Bloody Mary legend, did your dad ever find any evidence that it was a real thing?” I ask Dean.

“Not that I know of,” he says. He flips on the lights and steps over the blood.

“Yeah, neither did my dad,” I say. I kneel down and touch the dried blood. “I mean, everywhere else all over the country, kids will play Bloody Mary, and as far as we know, nobody dies from it.”

“Yeah, well, maybe everywhere it’s just a story, but here it’s actually happening.”

“The place where the legend began?” I speculate.

Dean nods with a slight one-shouldered shrug, considering that, and opens the medicine cabinet.

“But according to the legend, the person who says Bl–” I see my reflection in the mirror on the outside of the door. I stop short and close the medicine cabinet. “The person who says you-know-what gets it. But here…”

“Shoemaker gets it instead, yeah,” Dean finishes. “Never heard anything like that before. Still, the guy did die right in front of the mirror, and the daughter’s right. The way the legend goes–” Dean mimics me “– _you-know-who_ scratches your eyes out.”

“It’s worth checking in to.”

A rhythmic clicking sound comes from down the hallway. I recognize it as women’s heels. Dean and I jump and rush out of the bathroom. We’re confronted by the defensive friend of Donna’s from outside.

“What are you doing up here?” she demands.

“We–we…had to go to the bathroom,” Dean stammers.

“Together?” she says reprovingly. “Who are you?”

“Like we said downstairs, we worked with Donna’s dad,” Dean says.

The girl crosses her arms over her chest smugly. “He was a day trader or something. He worked by himself.”

Dean laughs awkwardly. “No, I know, I meant–”

“And all those weird questions downstairs, what was that?” she continues in an aggressive tone. “Tell me what’s going on or I start screaming.”

Dean and I take a step towards each other. She starts to tap her foot when we don’t say anything, then she opens her mouth.

“All right, all right, all right!” I say, holding my hands out to stop her. “We think something happened to Donna’s dad.”

“Yeah, a stroke,” she says.

“That’s not a sign of a typical stroke,” I say. “We think it might be something else.”

“Like what?”

“Honestly? We don’t know yet. But we don’t want it to happen to anyone else,” I say. “That’s the truth.”

“So, if you’re gonna scream, go right ahead,” Dean challenges her.

“Who are you, cops?” she asks, looking us up and down.

“Something like that,” Dean says.

“I’ll tell you what,” I say. I reach into my jacket pockets and find an old receipt and a pen. I write my phone number on the back of the receipt. “Here. If you think of anything, if you or your friends notice anything strange, out of the ordinary, just give us a call.”

She takes the receipt. Dean and I high-tail it out of there without another word before anyone else can stop us. It’s only until we’re safely inside the Impala that I can actually relax.

“Man, she was crazy,” I say. “I don’t think I’ve ever been afraid of a high-schooler before.”

“Me neither.” Dean makes a U-turn in the middle of the street. “But now that we’ve got this Bloody Mary lead, I say we hit the library.”

Central Public Library is actually pretty nice. It looks like a historic building, with the original brick and mortar, kind of ancient looking – something the town didn’t remodel. Inside the building is all modern, of course.

“All right, say Bloody Mary really is haunting this town,” Dean says while I scan the directory for which level the computers are on. “There’s gonna be some sort of proof, like a local woman who died nasty.”

I lead Dean up to the second level. “Yeah, but a legend this widespread is hard. I mean, there’s like fifty versions of who she actually is. One story says she’s a witch, another says she’s a mutilated bride. There’s a lot more.”

“All right, so what are we supposed to be looking for?”

“Every version’s got a few things in common,” I say. We weave through some rows of books. “It’s always a woman named Mary, and she always dies right in front of a mirror. So we’ve gotta search local newspapers, public records, as far back as they go. See if we can find a Mary who fits the bill.”

“Well that sounds annoying,” Dean mutters.

Just ahead of us are a couple of computers. “No, it won’t be so bad, as long as we…” My voice trails off. Posted on the screens of the only two computers in the library are ‘Out of Order’ signs. “I take it back. This will be very annoying.”

“What do you want to do?” Dean asks.

“We can sign up for a library card and steal some books on ancient lore, if they have any,” I suggest. “Or we can split up? One of us can check the hardcopies of public records, the other can go around town and talk to the locals….Hey, where are you going?”

Dean turns around on his way to the stairs and walks backwards as he talks. “There’s no way I’m sifting through heaps of files. And I’ve got the car.” He holds up his keys and jingles them. “I’ll see what books I can find first. See you back at the hotel later.”

“See you, asshole,” I say, but he’s already disappeared down the stairs.

I go on a hunt for someone who works at the library to see if I can get my hands on the paper files. There’s barely anyone here, not even kids doing homework after school. I guess there’s not much need for libraries anymore when everyone has internet in their homes.

The librarian I manage to track down gets extremely annoyed at my request. “And you want me to dig up those boxes from our storage why, again?”

“Uh...” I run my fingers through the hair above the nape of my neck. “Just for some research.”

“And this research is so urgent that you can’t wait until tomorrow when the computers will be up and running again?” she asks.

“That’s correct,” I say. I hold an unsteady smile while she glowers at me. I feel my cheeks quivering, the edges of my mouth struggling to stay up. Just when I think I can’t hold out any longer, she turns on her heel and disappears down the hall. My face immediately drops into a deadpan.

About thirty minutes later, she returns with three small boxes on a rolling cart.

“This is it?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says curtly.

“These are _all_ the public records for Toledo?”

“No. The rest of them were destroyed in a fire in the eighties.”

“Thanks,” I say coldly, making sure my glare is deadly. I doubt this is all that the library has, but it’s a start.

And it’s a start that leads to nowhere. I don’t even think there was a woman named Mary who died in this town in general. I stuff all of the papers back into the boxes, not even bothering to organize them, and leave the library without telling the librarian that I’ve finished. For good measure, I poke around for a book to steal and end up with The Black Pullet grimoire, a book about magical talismans.

It’s almost dark out. I walk all the way back to the hotel since Dean isn’t answering his phone and I haven’t seen a bus stop or cab.

The Impala isn’t parked outside of our room, so I figure I’ve got some time to myself. I go inside and flop down on the bed, thinking I’ll just watch TV until Dean shows up.

Maybe an hour later the door bursts open and a very disgruntled Dean walks in, carrying a couple of oil-soaked bags of what must be food, which he promptly tosses on the table.

With my eyes glued to the TV, I ask, “Did you find anything?”

“Oh, besides a whole new level of frustration?” Dean yanks off his boots and throws them at the foot of his bed. His leather jacket follows. “No. I’ve looked at everything. A few local women, a Laura and a Catherine, committed suicide in front of a mirror, and a giant mirror fell on a guy named Dave, but no Mary.”

“Maybe we just haven’t found it yet.”

“I’ve also been searching for strange deaths in the area, you know, eyeball bleeding, that sort of thing. There’s nothing. Whatever’s happening here, maybe it just ain’t Mary.” Dean pokes around in the bags of food he bought. “Chicken sandwich?” he asks. I nod and he tosses one to me, then scowls at the TV. “Are you watching _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_?”

My cheeks flush and I change the channel. “It was the only thing on.”

“That show is so unrealistic it’s painful to think about.”

The alarm clock on the nightstand beeps once, signaling the new hour, and _The Simpsons_ theme song plays on the TV. Dean grins, satisfied.

“Now, there’s some real TV,” he says as he settles into the chair at the table, propping his feet up on the neighboring seat. He takes a huge bite of his sandwich and asks, spraying food everywhere, “How did you do at the library?”

“You’re such a slob,” I grumble. I carefully unfold the sandwich. “The librarian was a total bitch. Apparently, there was a fire that burned up most of the public records, so I didn’t get to look through much. I think she was just too lazy to get it all out.” I take a bite. “Ugh, tomato.” I pull out the tomato slice and ball it up in the wrapper.

“Was she hot?” Dean asks eagerly.

“Huh?”

“The librarian, was she hot? You know, skirt, tight shirt, glasses.” Dean’s face takes on a dreamy look.

“Actually, she did have glasses and was wearing a skirt,” I say. Dean listens keenly. “But I don’t know if you would find a sixty-year-old woman with a wart on her nose attractive.”

“Ugh, come on,” Dean complains. “I’m eating here. I wanted to think of a sexy librarian. Maybe I would have stuck around if she had been.”

“Pornos don’t happen in real life, Dean.”

“Yeah, but you could at least go with it, create a nice fantasy for me.” Dean pouts.

“Well, Halloween’s at the end of the month, so maybe I’ll dress up as a sexy librarian for you,” I say while absentmindedly picking the sesame seeds off of the bun. There was no real reasoning behind my petty comment, in fact I’m surprised my brain even formed the thought.

A couple of silent moments pass before I look up and see that Dean’s got his eyes on me, his head tilted to the side. He smiles lasciviously.

“What?”

“Just trying to picture you in a tight skirt and a shirt that barely covers your boobs,” he says. He holds up both of his thumbs and index fingers in a box shape like a photographer envisioning a scene.

“You’re so weird,” I say, but I blush. No, I tell myself. Don’t you start to think about him thinking about you like that.

“Well, there’s nothing more we can do tonight as far as this Bloody Mary thing goes. Want to go get a drink?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say.

At the bar, Dean orders a couple of beers and a shot of whiskey for each of us. We take our drinks over to a table next to a dart board.

“Wanna play?” I ask. I take a handful of darts from the cup. “I bet I can beat you.”

“In your dreams, sweetheart,” Dean says. “I am an excellent dart player.” He picks up his shot glass. “Bottoms up, then we duel.”

We take our shots together and slam the glasses down on the table.

“Gah.” Dean purses his lips and gives his head a little shake. “That’s good stuff.”

“Mm-hmm,” I say. I hand Dean the red darts and keep the yellow ones for myself.

“Ladies first,” he says, bowing and sweeping his arm around towards the dart board.

I really think Dean underestimates my darting talent. I have two choices. One, play average right now and then blow him away later when he thinks he’s going to win or two, play with everything I’ve got and leave him speechless.

I step up to the white line, get my stance in check. Dean leans against the table with his arms casually crossed over his chest. I give him the most sweet, innocent smile I can muster, then I turn to the board, aim my dart, and land an inner bulls-eye on the first try.

Dean’s jaw drops.

I saunter over to him and pat his chest. “You’re up, big boy.”

He gets his bearings and determinedly takes his place at the line. He doesn’t take quite as long as I do to calculate his aim but he still hits the outer bulls-eye.

“Nice,” I say. “Gonna be a close game.”

And it is. I reach zero when Dean only has five points left to clear. We finish our beer, play a few more rounds, drink a couple more shots of whiskey. Overall, it’s a good night. We’re on a case, but we’re having fun for the first time since we met up again last week. Fun is what we both really need.

I don’t know what time it is when Dean and I leave the bar. I head to the passenger’s side of the car, expecting Dean to go to the driver’s side, but he follows me instead and places his hand on the door handle before I can get to it.

“Just being a gentleman,” he says, his words slurring a little.

My head feels a little bit fuzzy. It only gets worse when I look up and find Dean standing close to me. Too close. My heart starts to race, I can actually feel it pounding against my sternum, although I most likely imagine that.

The lights from the bar cast a shadow over Dean’s face and silhouettes his body at the same time, but his eyes are so green that I can still faintly see them, even in the shadows. I can get lost just looking into his eyes, drinking in every feature of his face.

He slides his hands around my waist. Even though my sensible side is screaming _No! No! No!,_ I respond to his actions by wrapping my arms around his neck.

He doesn’t speak. He just leans in. His lips don’t find mine, though. Instead, they travel along my jawline, down my neck and back up again. The stubble on his face tickles my skin. I close my eyes and sigh deeply.

This might finally be the time Dean kisses me. I mean, we’ve kissed before. A long time ago, when we were eleven and we wanted to know what a kiss felt like after seeing it so many times on TV. But that was just a peck on the lips, and we were both grossed out after. This is different.

I try to push the thought out of my head that Dean’s only getting so close to me because he’s a little bit drunk. I try to ignore the part of me that’s saying Dean’s only coming on to me because he’s horny and upset about his dad. It doesn’t matter what I think, though, because as Dean bites my ear softly, my cell phone rings.

Dean nuzzles his face against my neck and groans. “Don’t answer it,” he whispers.

I figure it’s as good a time as any to stop Dean and I from going too far. “I have to. Could be important.” I take out my phone. Caller ID is a number I don’t recognize. “Hello?”

“Hi, is this Harley?” a frantic, scared voice says on the other end.

“Yeah.” I wiggle around in Dean’s arms. He pulls me closer and continues to kiss my neck as I talk.

“It’s Charlie. I met you earlier at Mr. Shoemaker’s service.”

I stand up straighter and push Dean away from me with more force, sobering up quicker than if I was dunked in a cold bath. He backs off and looks at me with concern. I hold a finger to my lips to quiet him. “Charlie? Are you okay?”

“That depends,” Charlie says. It sounds like she’s been crying. “That other girl that was at our table, her name was Jill. She’s my friend, and she’s dead. Her eyes were gone.” Sobs and static come in through the speaker.

“Where are you?” I ask.

“I’m at home.”

“Stay inside, don’t look at any mirrors. We’ll meet you first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Can’t we meet now?”

“There’s really nothing we can do for you right now,” I say slowly, trying not to sound rude. “And…Dean and I are sort of mildly incapacitated at the moment.”

Silence on the other end of the line.

“Charlie?”

“Okay, tomorrow morning at the park on Lemon Avenue.” The line cuts off.

I close my phone.

“What’s wrong?” Dean asks.

“That was Charlie, the girl from the service. She said her friend Jill was killed today. Her eyes were missing.”

Dean hangs his head, sobering up at the bomb I dropped. “We’ve got to get to the bottom of this.”

“I know. We’re meeting her tomorrow morning. I figure we can talk to her more, get some details. Hopefully some leads.”

“Yeah. Let’s get back to the hotel.”

“You okay to drive?” I ask.

Dean scoffs. “Of course.” He opens my door and gestures me inside. I don’t say anything on the way back to the room. I just listen to the song on the radio without actually hearing it.

Charlie is waiting for us at the park when Dean and I arrive the next morning around ten. She looks awful. Not any better that I feel, though, that’s for sure. Her eyes are red and puffy, most likely from crying all night, and it looks like she hasn’t brushed her hair or changed her clothes.

“Hey, Charlie,” Dean says. He sits down on the bench next to her. “Tell us what happened.”

“I was talking on the phone with Jill yesterday after the service,” Charlie begins quietly. “She started joking about the whole Bloody Mary thing, saying it wasn’t real. I told her it was.” She takes in a deep breath and lets it out slowly.

“What happened next?” Dean asks.

“She told me she’d say it to prove me wrong. So she went to her bathroom and…she said it. Bloody Mary. Three times. And she screamed.” Charlie covers her ears. Probably hearing the scream again. “But then she laughed. Said ‘I told you it wasn’t real’. Then, maybe six hours after we hung up, Jill’s mom calls me in hysterics, saying that Jill was dead. She found her on her bathroom floor.”

“And her eyes were gone?” I ask, to confirm what she said last night. For all I know I could have been imagining that part. My head was too wrapped up in other things.

Charlie nods. “But it couldn’t be because she said it. I’m insane, right?” She looks at Dean and I expectantly.

“No, you’re not insane,” Dean says delicately.

She rests her elbows on her knees and puts her face in her hands. “Oh, God, that makes me feel so much worse.”

“Look,” I say. “We think something’s happening here. Something that can’t be explained.”

“And we’re going to stop it, but we could use your help,” Dean says.

“How could I help?” Charlie asks incredulously. Fresh tears spill down her cheeks.

“We need to get inside Jill’s room,” I say.

“I don’t think now is the best time,” Charlie says through sniffles. She takes a wad of tissue out of her jacket pocket and blows her nose.

“The sooner the better,” I say. “We need to figure out what we’re dealing with before anyone else gets hurt.”

Charlie nods. “I’ll show you how to get to Jill’s house. I’ll think of something to tell her mom.”

The three of us get in the Impala and Charlie directs us to the north part of town. We park a couple of houses down from Jill’s and Charlie gets out. She leans down to the window until she’s eye level with Dean and I.

“There’s no way you two are getting through the front door,” she says. “So do what you have to do. Jill’s room is on the second floor and faces the street.”

When she’s out of sight, Dean and I get out and pack a couple of things from the trunk in a duffel bag. There’s very little we need, since guns and holy water and salt probably won’t do much good against a killer mirror, so the bag looks empty.

“Got the camcorder?” Dean asks.

“Oops, no.” I duck into the back seat and grab the digital camera from Dean’s backpack, which is wedged between the inside of the car and the small cooler that we keep waters and occasionally beer in. I hand it to him and he puts it in the duffel. “Let’s go scope out the place.”

Jill’s house has three small steps leading up to a wide, open porch with a long, flat roof. We could probably enter through her window on the second floor if we can get on top of the roof. On either side of the house is a metal gate separating the front yard from the back. There’s about a foot of cement in between the house and the gate. Just enough for us to get a footing.

Dean leans over. “Climb the wall?”

“Climb the wall,” I say.

We sneak up the front lawn. I climb up on the outside of the porch, my feet wedged between the wood posts of the railing, and peer inside, making sure the majority of my body is concealed by the thick vines growing along the wooden posts supporting the porch roof. I see Charlie talking to an older woman who has her back to me.

“Let’s go,” I say. Dean gives me a leg up and I balance on the flat parts of the gate. He hands up the duffel bag and I toss it on the roof. Dean lifts himself on to the wall with ease. We maneuver our way across the porch roof and crouch on either side of Jill’s window.

“She’s here,” I say, nudging Dean.

Charlie locks Jill’s door behind her and crosses the room to open the window for us. I crawl in first and Dean throws me the duffel bag. I set it down on Jill’s bed and dig through it until I find the digital camera. After Dean climbs through the window, he shuts the curtains.

“What did you tell Jill’s mom?” Dean asks.

“Just that I needed some time alone with Jill’s pictures and things,” Charlie says. She stands awkwardly in the corner, like she’s uncomfortable being in the room that her best friend died in. “I hate lying to her.”

“Trust us, it’s for the greater good,” Dean says. “Hit the lights.”

Charlie reaches over and flips the switch. “What are you guys looking for?”

“We’ll let you know when we find it,” I say. I open the small screen on the digital camera and turn it on. I push a couple of different buttons but I can’t find what I’m looking for. I hold the camera out to Dean. “Night vision?”

Dean presses the one button I didn’t try. The screen turns green.

“Perfect,” I say. I aim the camera at Dean for a test shot. He looks back over his shoulder and sticks out his butt provocatively.

“Do I look like Paris Hilton?” he asks, sticking his finger in his mouth.

I giggle. Dean smiles and takes out a homemade EMF reader. He walks around, aiming the small, beeping device around the furniture while I film the mirrors in the room.

“So I don’t get it,” I say. I open Jill’s closet and record the length of the mirror on the inside of the door. “I mean, the first victim didn’t summon Mary, and the second victim did. How’s she choosing them?”

“Beats me,” Dean says. He turns to Charlie, who still huddles in the corner. “I want to know why Jill said it in the first place.”

“It’s just a joke,” Charlie mutters.

“Yeah, well, somebody’s going to say it again, it’s just a matter of time,” I say. I close the closet door and film the mirror on the vanity table. It’s clean. I make my way to the bathroom. In here, the camera picks up a pattern along the bottom edge of the mirror, right above the sink. I bring the lens closer and notice that the lighter tints of green color is blood residue.

“Hey,” I call out to Dean. “There’s a black light in the trunk, right?”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “I’ll go get it.” He climbs back out of the window.

Charlie walks over to the bathroom. “What did you find?”

“Blood,” I say. “Blood that dripped from _behind_ the mirror.”

I yank the frame off of the wall. Both the back of the mirror and the wall it hung on are clean. Huh. I take the mirror out of the bathroom and lay it face down on Jill’s bed. Dean crawls back through the window at this point. He flips on the black light and hands it to me. There’s brown paper covering the back of the mirror, but the light doesn’t show any traces of blood on it. I rip off the paper and Charlie gasps.

On the back of the mirror is an invisible handprint made visible only through infrared. The name “Gary Bryman” is invisibly written underneath. Both things look like they had been put there with blood, but I can’t understand how the blood was removed without smearing the print and letters.

“Gary Bryman?” Charlie whispers.

“You know who that is?” Dean asks.

“No.”

“Guess it’s time we find out,” I say. I pull out my cell phone and take a picture of the illuminated backing of the mirror.

We leave Jill’s room, Charlie through the door and Dean and I back out of the window. He and I reach the Impala before Charlie does. She gets into the back seat and Dean drives to the library.

“I’ll go run a search real quick,” I say when Dean stops the car.

“We’ll wait at that park over there,” Dean says, nodding to a playground across the street.

Thankfully the library computers are up and running like the librarian said they would be. I don’t even have to do anything fancy to find what I’m looking for this time. All I do is type in “Gary Bryman” into the search engine and the first link that pops up gives me what I need. I print out the page and leave the building.

“So, Gary Bryman was an eight-year-old boy,” I say as I walk up to the park bench where Dean and Charlie are sitting. “Two years ago he was killed in a hit and run. The car was described as a black Toyota Camry. But nobody got the plates or saw the driver.”

“Oh, my God,” Charlie squeals. She covers her mouth with her hands.

“What?” I ask.

“Jill drove that car,” she says through her hands.

I look at Dean. So Mary killed Jill because Jill killed Gary Bryman? What does that mean for Steven Shoemaker? That he killed someone too? Dean’s already forming deductions in his head, I can see it in his face. His eyes meet mine and I nod. This communicating without speaking thing really works out for us sometimes.

“We need to get back to your friend Donna’s house,” Dean says urgently to Charlie. We race back to the car and Dean speeds over to the Shoemaker house. Donna opens the door.

“What’s going on?” she asks suspiciously.

“Can we, uh, use your bathroom?” Dean says with a grin.

“Charlie?” Donna turns to her friend.

“Let them in, Donna. It’s about your dad,” Charlie says.

After a moment of deliberation, Donna steps back and lets us inside. Dean and I go straight to the upstairs bathroom. He unhinges the medicine cabinet door and separates the mirror from the wood. I shine the black light over it. There’s another handprint, but this time the name is Linda Shoemaker.

“Could that be Steven’s wife? Steven killed his wife?” I whisper.

“Let’s go ask Donna,” Dean says. “Could be anyone.”

I take a picture of the handprint on my phone while Dean holds the black light over it. Dean tries his best to reassemble the medicine cabinet before we leave the bathroom, but it’s destroyed. Downstairs, Donna and Charlie sit on barstools at the kitchen counter. Dean and I stand across from them.

“Who was Linda Shoemaker?” Dean asks Donna.

“My mom,” Donna says, confused. “Why?”

“Did she die?” I ask.

“Why are you asking me this?”

“We’re sorry, but it’s important.”

“Yeah, she died, okay? She overdosed on sleeping pills. It was an accident, end of story.” Donna stands up. “I think you should leave.”

“Now, Donna, just listen–” Dean begins.

“Get out of my house!” Donna shouts. She runs out of the kitchen. I listen to her footsteps ascend the stairs, cross overhead. Then a door slams.

“Maybe you should go,” Charlie says. “I’m going to stick around.”

“All right,” Dean says. “Whatever you do, don’t–”

“Believe me, I won’t say it.” Charlie shows us out.

We’re definitely making progress on the case. At least we have some sort of motive behind Mary’s killings, and the way she picks her victims. What we don’t have is Mary herself.

As soon as we walk through the door of the hotel room I flop face-down on my bed.

“Where’s your laptop?” Dean asks.

I grunt and wave my arm in the general direction of my backpack. My arm falls back on the mattress like a limp noodle. I listen to Dean unzip my bag, set the laptop on the table, make a phone call.

“Yeah, uh, a large pepperoni with extra mushrooms and a large order of hot wings…Yeah, delivery…One-six-eight-nine Benore Road, room ten. Oh, make sure that delivery boy brings lots of ranch dressing. My hot wings basically go swimming in the stuff. Yeah, thanks.”

“You read my mind,” I say. My words are muffled because my face is still in the comforter.

“Yeah, I need brain food while I work.” The methodical clacking of the keyboard fills the quiet room.

I prop myself up on my elbow. “How come you didn’t ask me what type of pizza I wanted?”

Dean’s face drops into a deadpan when he looks at me. “What would you have ordered, Harley?”

I frown and mumble my answer incoherently.

“Didn’t catch that.”

“Pepperoni, extra mushrooms, hot wings,” I mutter a little bit louder.

Dean smiles triumphantly. “Uh huh, that’s what I thought. I remember things about you, too, Miss Peanut M&M’s.”

My heart and stomach decide to do backflips at the same time. I really have to stop reacting like this to every little thing Dean says or does. It’s hard enough to just look at his face during the day because he’s so freaking beautiful.

“What’s the ETA on the food?” I ask.

“Fifteen to twenty minutes, the usual bullshit.” Dean resumes his typing.

I kick off my shoes and take off my jacket and long sleeve shirt. It’s warm enough in the room for just a tank top even though it’s cold and looks like rain outside. Dean bends over the laptop, his brows pulled down in concentration. I walk over to him and read over his shoulder.

“Wait, wait, wait, you’re doing a _nationwide_ search?” I say, pulling the laptop toward me so I can read the screen.

“Yup,” Dean says, pulling the laptop back. “The NCIC, the FBI database. At this point any Mary who died in front of a mirror is good enough for me.”

“But if she’s haunting the town, she would have died in the town.”

“I’m telling you there’s nothing local, I’ve checked. So unless you got a better idea…”

“The way Mary’s choosing her victims, though,” I say, tapping my lip. “It’s seems like there’s a pattern.”

“I know, I was thinking the same thing.”

“Mr. Shoemaker somehow killing his wife, Jill’s hit and run…”

“Both had secrets where people died.”

“Right. I mean, there’s a lot of folklore about mirrors, that they reveal all your lies, all your secrets. That they’re a true reflection of your soul, which is why it’s bad luck to break them.”

“Right, right,” Dean agrees. “So maybe if you’ve got a secret, I mean like a really nasty one where someone dies, Mary sees it and punishes you for it.”

“Whether you summon her or not.” I shiver suddenly. Chills run down my spine and the hairs on my arms stand up.

“You cold?” Dean asks.

“Uh, yeah,” I lie. I had better not look in a mirror until this case is done. It’s a miracle I’ve survived this long.

“Take a look at this,” Dean says. I drag my chair around the table and sit next to him. I’m so grateful he didn’t press the cold thing in our moderately warm room.

Dean turns the laptop slightly so I can see. On the screen is a crime scene photo of a woman lying dead in a pool of blood in front of an antique mirror. Dean scrolls down to the next photo. The picture is of a handprint, a bloody handprint, with the letters T-R-E written in blood.

“That looks like the same handprint,” I say, comparing it to the printout of the picture I took of the back of the mirror in the Shoemaker house.

Dean nods and clicks back to the main report. “Her name was Mary Worthington. An unsolved murder in Fort Wayne, Indiana.” He prints out the two crime scene photos on the small portable printer we have.

“Guess we’re taking a road trip in the morning,” I say.

There’s a knock on the door. Dean and I grin happily at each other. I clear off the table and set out some napkins from the taco place, since we don’t have plates, while Dean pays for the pizza. He balances the pizza box on top of the hot wings so he could open the lid and take out a slice before he even gets to the table.

“Come on, Dean,” I scold him as I take the boxes from him.

“Wait a minute,” Dean mutters, his eyes narrowing. “Jerk didn’t bring me my ranch.” He shoves the hot wings in my hands and runs to the door, slamming it shut behind him. I hear him yell, “Hey, pizza boy! You didn’t give me the ranch, man! You gotta earn your tip, dude.”

He comes back in the door with a giant handful of square packets of ranch and a mischievous smile on his face.

I shake my head. “You’re so bad.”

“Eh, but you still love me,” he jokes.

My stomach lurches. I just laugh a little, hoping he doesn’t hear the slight hint of hysteria, and start to scarf down a slice of pizza so I don’t have to respond. The cheese is scorching hot.

“Ow! Is _hoh_ ,” I attempt to say with my mouth open to try to let the heat out. I toss the chunk of pizza around to keep it off of my tongue.

Dean laughs. “I could really go for a cold one right now, but I have no intention of leaving this hotel room tonight.” He sighs, stretches his arms out with a slice of pizza in his hand, and props his feet up on the air conditioning unit on the wall.

“You look comfortable,” I say when I’ve recovered from the inferno in my mouth.

“I am,” he says through a mouthful of food. “I’m glad we got this lead, with the mirror thing. It just sucks that someone else had to die so we could find it.”

“That’s the nature of our job, though. As much as we try, we can’t always save everyone.”

“Yeah, I know, but still.” Dean’s face turns somber. “She was only in high school, you know? It just sucks.”

“I know,” I say softly.

We’re quiet for a few minutes, eating and mulling over that last depressing thought. It’s still pretty early, maybe about six in the evening. We should honestly head out to Fort Wayne tonight, but it’s such a short distance away that by the time we get there it will be too late to talk to anyone and we’ll have to wait until morning anyway.

“Wanna play some poker?” I ask.

Dean raises an eyebrow. “You gonna kick my ass at cards, too?”

I laugh. “No, I won’t. I promise. I’m not that good.”

“I don’t trust you,” Dean says with narrowed eyes. “You’re trying to hustle me.”

“I am not,” I try to say firmly, but it just comes out as a giggle. “Besides, we’re not playing for money or anything. Nothing to hustle.”

“So you’re saying all that time you spent with your dad on the road, stopping at different bars and saloons with other hunters, you never played poker?” Dean asks.

I clamp my lips together and try not to say anything, because technically, yes, I did spend a lot of time playing poker.

“Ah, well,” Dean says when I don’t answer him. “I guess I do believe you. You were never that good at cards when we were kids, anyway. Sam always kicked your ass at Old Maid.”

“Shut up!” I knock his legs off the air conditioner. “Fine, I’m pretty decent at poker.”

“I knew it,” Dean says smugly. He laughs quietly and lets it die off. I love the sound of his laugh, of his voice. He’s got a low, sort of husky voice. It’s sexy, it makes him seem older than he is. “Come on, let’s play.”

The night goes just about as well as it did last night. We finish our pizza and wings in between games of Blackjack and Texas Hold ‘Em. We easily lose track of time. After a few hours of sitting on the hard wood chairs, we both agree that our butts hurt and we stretch out on one of the beds and continue playing cards.

At around two in the morning I start to get drowsy to the point where I can’t lift my head anymore and anything Dean says sounds like he’s speaking from outside of a fish bowl. I rest my head on my outstretched arm for a moment, thinking I’ll just close my eyes for a minute and be good to go for another hour or so, but I end up completely falling asleep.

During the few moments where I’m more than halfway unconscious but still vaguely aware of what’s going on as it comes between dark flashes of nothingness, I feel Dean kiss my forehead before he turns off the lights and gets into the other bed. I have a feeling I slept with a smile on my face the entire night.

The sun shines through the window in the morning, the bright beams of light falling right on me. I rub my face into the pillow, wondering why the darkness behind my eyelids has turned lighter. I lift myself up on my elbows and look around the room, squinting.

Dean is still asleep, on his stomach on the edge of the bed with his head turned toward me, mouth open slightly. His arm dangles off the mattress and a light snoring escapes his mouth. I smile wearily and roll on to my back. Maybe I can get a few more hours in before we drive to Indiana. That would require me closing the curtains, though, and I’m not sure if I have enough willpower to get up and do that.

Willpower means nothing to my body when I actually look outside. I’m on my feet and at the window before my brain had time to think about if it wanted to get up or not. I press my face against the glass and smile. Now I know why the sun seemed so bright in early October.

“Dean!” I shout. “Dean, wake up!”

The response I get is an agitated groan. I run over to his bed, bubbling with excitement, and shake his shoulders.

“Come on, lazy bones, come look!” I say. I tug on his arm in a pointless attempt to lift him out of bed.

“Somebody better be dying,” Dean grumbles when he opens his eyes.

I consider. “Sorry, no. You have to come look, seriously.”

Dean reluctantly gets up and lets himself be dragged across the room. I point excitedly to the window. His eyes widen. “Whoa, first snow.”

“Yeah!” I squeal, practically jumping up and down. “Remember what we used to do when we saw the first snow of the year?”

“Of course I do,” Dean says. He rubs the back of his neck and yawns. “But it’s still warm outside, this snow won’t stick. It’s not the same kind of snow we’re used to. Look, it’s melting before it even hits the ground.”

“Killjoy,” I mutter.

“All right, then, let’s go,” he says with a sigh.

I pull on a sweater over my t-shirt and shove my sockless feet into boots. I’m out the door before Dean walked back to his bed for his shoes.

What makes first snow so special isn’t necessarily about me or the snow. It’s about Sam. One time when Dean and I were nine and Sam was five, our dads teamed up with a couple of other hunters to track down and eradicate a vampire nest. We were left in the care of Bobby Singer.

Dean and I were very perceptive kids, definitely wise beyond our years, that’s why at the age of nine I was able to appreciate this event more than any other nine year old would have. Bobby lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and owns his own salvage yard. That fall had been colder than normal, which made winter arrive faster. We were with Bobby for two weeks and it didn’t rain once, even though fat, dark purple clouds threatened rain every single day.

Then, one morning, Sam wakes Dean and I up much like I just woke Dean up now. The three of us had fallen asleep on the couch downstairs watching a Godzilla movie. Sam grabbed our hands and pulled us out onto the back porch. What I saw wasn’t a big deal at all, but to Sam, it was everything. It was Sam’s first time seeing snow.

To this day, I will never forget the look of wonder on Sam’s little face. His big brown eyes were open so wide I thought they were going to pop out of his head. He wore the biggest smile, standing there between Dean and I, holding our hands in each of his as he watched the snow slowly cover the old junk cars in the lot in back of the house. He didn’t know something like this was even real.

It was pure, childlike awe, something Dean told me a few years later he wanted to preserve as long as he could for his brother. Someone as precious as Sam didn’t deserve to have that innocence stripped from him because of the choices his father made.

Judging by the amount of snow that was on the ground, I’d say it started around the time we fell asleep. The three of us played for hours that day. I remember Sam handling the snow so delicately, as if he were afraid he would damage it and make it all disappear.

What was so important to me then, and what stuck with me all these years, is that the pureness I witnessed in Sam is what life is all about, and it’s what my dad was fighting to save, to protect. It’s the reason I became a hunter, too. So that maybe children wouldn’t have to be afraid of the dark, of the monsters under their bed. So that maybe the world could have a little more innocence and a little less hostility, less anger. So that maybe, just maybe, people would learn to love more and see life through the eyes of a child.

I know now that that was way too much to ask for, but to my nine-year-old self, it made a world of sense. Every year the first snow reminds me of Sam’s awestruck face, of the hopes I had because of it. I still try to fight for that innocence even though I don’t believe it’s entirely achievable anymore.

This is what I think about now as I lean against the hood of the Impala, my head tilted toward the sky so I can feel the snow on my face, taste the nothingness of the flakes as they land on my tongue. I can’t run and play and dance like I used to with Sam and Dean since Dean’s right, the snow is disappearing before it has time to collect on the ground. But I get to relive my memories. The good ones, for a change.

“You’re thinking about Sam,” Dean says. It’s not a question.

He startles me out of my reverie. I look over at him. He leans against the doorframe of our room, his arms crossed over his chest. I nod. It isn’t until after I let my excitement overwhelm me that I realize making such a big deal about the snow would bring back memories of Sam for Dean as well, and even though he tries to pretend he’s not, Dean’s still hurt that Sam left to go to college.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I should have thought that through earlier.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Dean says. “I think about that day every time I see the first snow.”

“I’m curious where you’ve been for the first snow in the past ten years,” I say. “We were in different places, it happened at different times. But we were still thinking about the same thing.”

“I remember the first year that went by when we weren’t together,” Dean says. “Sam and I were at Bobby’s again. I was so torn up the day it snowed and I couldn’t figure out why for a long time.” Dean furrows his brows and lowers his eyes. The edges of his mouth pull down into a slight frown.

“What?” I ask.

“Nothing,” Dean says. He inhales quickly through his nose and raises his eyebrows once as he straightens up. “Ready to hit the road?”

“Sure,” I say quietly.

“I need to stop and get gas on the way.”

We go back inside. I get dressed, pack up a couple of things for the trip. We should be back by evening.

It’s still lightly snowing when we drive away from the hotel, enough to make white swirls blow around the trees and sunlight reflect off the falling flakes. We need mood music.

“Can shotgun pick the music again or does she have to shut her cakehole?” I ask, remembering his speech.

Dean laughs and hands me the box of tapes. “Well, since you asked so nicely…”

I know what I want to listen to already and I find the cassette right away. The song I’m dying to hear is the first on the track list, but Dean must have taken out the cassette in the middle of listening to it so I have to rewind it. The tape starts to play the end of _Miracles Out Of Nowhere_ before I press rewind.

“Kansas?” Dean says.

“Mm-hmm. You sound disappointed.”

“No. Just play some Stones next, or Pink Floyd,” he says.

“Seriously? They aren’t in your catalogue of mullet rock,” I say with a grin. Dean responds with a frown.

The cassette reaches the beginning of the tape. I’m already prepared to sing since the opening words are acapella. There’s the fraction of a second of crackling in the speakers before Steve Walsh begins: _“Carry on my wayward so-o-o-n, there’ll be peace when you are do-one. Lay your weary head to re-e-e-st, don’t you cry no more.”_

Dean beats his hands to the drums and makes the guitar sounds with his mouth. I sing the next lines dramatically with him, we scream the chorus, rock out on the instrumental solos. Music in general can turn my mood around in an instant, but throw singing with Dean in the Impala to the mix and my spirits soar higher than the clouds.

By request, I play The Rolling Stones’ _Sticky Fingers_ album when my song is over. After _I Got the Blues_ , I turn the music down to background noise.

“I know we’re going to Fort Wayne, but what exactly are we going to do there?” I ask. “We can’t just walk into the police department and ask for details on a twenty-year-old cold case.”

“The police report listed the head detective as a Howard Brady,” Dean says. “I looked him up. He’s retired now, but he was a dedicated detective, hated leaving anything unsolved. I figure we could start with him.”

Brady is a short, dark-skinned man with short, thick gray hair. We tell him we’re reporters, and even though he’s skeptical of us he lets us right inside as soon as we mention the case we’re interested in.

“I was on the job for thirty-five years, detective for most of that,” Brady says when we’re all seated in lumpy chairs or on a lumpy sofa. “Now, everybody packs it in with a few loose ends, but the Mary Worthington murder…that one still gets me.”

“What exactly happened?” Dean asks.

“You kids said you were reporters?” Brady says, the skeptical tone back in his voice.

I try to support our cover with some facts. “We know Mary was nineteen, lived by herself. We know she won a few local beauty contests, dreamed of getting out of Indiana, becoming an actress. And we know the night of March twenty-ninth someone broke into her apartment and murdered her, cut out her eyes with a knife.”

“That’s right,” Brady says gruffly.

“See, sir,” Dean says respectfully, “When we asked you what happened, we wanted to know what _you_ think happened.”

Brady is silent for a moment, looking back and forth between Dean and I, pondering something inside his head. He glances over at the file cabinets. “Come over here,” he says, and leads us to the cabinets. He flips through a few folders in one drawer and pulls out a particularly thin file. “Technically, I’m not supposed to have a copy of this.”

Judging by the amount of files Brady’s got in his house, I’d say there’s a lot of things he’s not supposed to have copies of. Brady opens Mary Worthington’s file and sets it on the desk before us. The first picture is the photo Dean found of the bloody handprint and the three letters.

“Now, see that there? T-R-E? I think Mary was trying to spell out the name of her killer.”

“You know who it was?” I ask.

“Not for sure,” Brady says darkly. “But there was a local man, a surgeon. Trevor Sampson.” He slides over the first picture to reveal a black and white photo of a man in a surgeon’s get-up, holding a scalpel. “I think he cut her up good.”

“Why would he do something like that?” I ask.

“Her diary mentioned a man that she was seeing,” Brady says. “She called him by his initial, T. Well, in her last entry, she was gonna tell T’s wife about their affair.”

“Yeah, but how do you know it was Sampson who killed her?” Dean asks.

Brady hangs his head. “It’s hard to say, but the way her eyes were cut out…it was almost professional.”

“But you could never prove it?” I pick up the photo of Trevor Sampson. He looks powerful, smug, as if everyone else is below him and he knows they know it.

“No,” Brady says. “No prints, no witnesses. He was meticulous.”

“Is he still alive?” Dean asks.

“Nope.” Brady falls heavily into the desk chair and sighs. “If you ask me, Mary spent her last living moments trying to expose this guy’s secret. But she never could.”

“Where’s she buried?” I ask.

“She wasn’t. She was cremated.”

I look at Dean. If there’s no body and she’s still running around killing people, there’s got to be something keeping her here.

Dean nods to the picture. “What about that mirror?” he asks. “It’s not in some evidence lockup somewhere, is it?”

“Ah, no,” Brady says, peering closer at the photo. “It was returned to Mary’s family a long time ago.”

“You have the names of her family by any chance?” I ask hopefully.

Brady narrows his eyes apprehensively. It’s one thing for us to be curious about an old cold case, it’s another to contact a family member after all these years and drudge up the past. But Brady’s dedication to the case gets the better of him and he gives us the name of Mary’s older brother.

Dean and I head to the door with Brady following us. “Thank you for your time, Detective,” I say.

“No problem,” Brady says.

When we’re in the car I call the operator and get a number for a Mr. Alec Worthington. I act like I want to purchase the mirror, but he says it’s been sold already.

“So?” Dean asks when I hang up the phone.

“So that was Mary’s brother. The mirror was in the family for years…until he sold it one week ago to a store called Estate Antiques. A store in Toledo.”

Dean starts the car and drives to the eastbound highway. “So wherever the mirror goes, that’s where Mary goes?”

“Her spirit’s definitely tied up with it somehow,” I say.

“Isn’t there an old superstition that says mirrors can capture spirits?”

“Yeah, there is,” I say. “When someone would die in a house, people would cover up the mirrors so the ghost wouldn’t get trapped.”

“So Mary dies in front of a mirror and it draws in her spirit.”

“Yeah. But how could she move through like, a hundred different mirrors?”

“I don’t know, but if the mirror is the source, I say we find it and smash it,” Dean says heartily.

I look out of the window. “Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe.”

A few minutes later my phone rings. I recognize the number this time. “It’s Charlie,” I tell Dean before I answer the phone. “Charlie?”

“She’s going to get me!” she whimpers frantically before the line cuts off.

“Charlie?” I look at the screen, which flashes ‘Call Ended’. I dial her number again but the phone rings out. “Step on it, Dean. Mary’s found Charlie.”

About an hour later my phone rings again. “Charlie? Are you okay?”

“No,” she whispers. “She’s going to get me.”

“Where are you?”

“At school. She found me at school.”

“Okay, Charlie, listen to me,” I say sternly. “You need to go to the Ramada Hotel on Benore Road. Room ten. Do _not_ look into anything that has a reflection. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she says quietly.

“We’re on our way.”

“What happened?” Dean asks after I end the call.

“She said Mary found her at school,” I say.

“How the hell did she get there?”

I shake my head slightly. “I don’t know. Someone had to say it, though, and I know Charlie wouldn’t do that.”

Dean looks over at me. “Donna?”

“Maybe.”

We cross the border into Ohio. It’s only another thirty minutes to Toledo. When we get closer I notice that it isn’t snowing anymore. My heart sinks. I should have known it wouldn’t last, given the temperature. I just wish I had the chance to enjoy it a little bit longer.

Charlie sits in front of room ten, rocking back and forth slightly with her hood pulled over head and her arms around her chest, when we roll up to the hotel. She doesn’t stir when we call her name.

“I don’t want to look,” comes her muffled reply.

I help her up. “Let’s get you inside.”

Dean opens the door and I guide Charlie to one of the beds. She balls herself up on it, her head lowered into her raised knees. I shut the blackout curtains and the bathroom door while Dean covers up the television and a mirror on the wall with a sheet.

Dean sits down next to Charlie. “Hey, hey, it’s okay. You can open up your eyes. It’s all right.”

Charlie slowly lifts her head and tentatively looks around. She pushes her hood back.

“Now listen,” Dean says. “You’re gonna stay right here on this bed and you’re not gonna look at glass or anything else that has a reflection, okay? And as long as you do that, she can’t get you.”

“But I can’t keep that up forever.” Charlie drops her head again and begins to cry softly. “I’m gonna die, aren’t I?”

“No,” I say. I sit down on the other side of her. “Not any time soon, at least. But we need to know what happened.”

“We were in the bathroom. Donna said it.”

Dean gets my attention and looks at me behind Charlie’s back with an angry I-told-you-it-was-that-stupid-bitch look.

“That’s not what we’re talking about,” I say, waving Dean off. “Something happened in your life. A secret, where someone got hurt. Can you tell us about it?”

Charlie looks confused for a moment. She stares straight ahead, her head slightly tilted to the side, silent tears rolling down her cheeks. Then, as she understands what we’re asking, she lowers her eyes. She tells her story between sobs.

“I had this boyfriend. I loved him, but he kind of scared me too, you know? One night at his house we got in a fight. I broke up with him and he got upset, said he needed me and he loved me.” She takes a moment to choke out a particularly loud sob. “He said, ‘Charlie, if you walk out that door right now, I’m gonna kill myself.’ And you know what I said?” She hiccups. “I said, ‘Go ahead.’ And I left. How could I say that? How could I leave him like that? I just didn’t believe he would do it. I should have.”

“It’s not your fault,” Dean says.

“Feels like it,” she mumbles.

“Look, Dean and I have to go,” I say. Charlie’s grabbing my arm for dear life before I finish my sentence. “You’ll be fine here as long as you do what we said.”

I get up from the bed and walk over to the table. I get chills again like last night and instinctively wrap my arms around myself. Dean and I know what we have to do now – find the mirror and smash it. But Mary travels through mirrors all over town. There’s no way to say for sure if just smashing the mirror will end this.

I hear a rushing sound from outside. It must be raining. I peek out of the curtain – which opens barely a fraction of an inch – and Charlie suddenly screams bloody murder. A loud thud follows her scream. I whip around, my heart racing. Dean is on the floor and Charlie pushed herself back against the headboard.

Dean gets up and rubs his butt. “What the hell was that?” he growls.

“She opened the curtains,” Charlie whispered.

I roll my eyes. “Dean, we gotta go. It’s getting dark.”

It’s probably not the best time to leave Charlie alone, but I figure it would be better to end Mary now instead of wasting time waiting until she calms down. I’m not eager to get to the mirror, though, because if my theory is right, I’ll have to summon Mary. And that would mean I have to explain to Dean why she would come if I did. He might see me as a completely different person after this case is over.

“You know her boyfriend killing himself, that’s not really Charlie’s fault,” Dean says as we drive away in the rain.

“You know as well as I do spirits don’t exactly see shades of gray, Dean. Charlie had a secret, someone died. That’s good enough for Mary.”

“I guess.”

I take a deep breath, muster up some courage. I don’t get much, but it’s all I have to work with. “You know, I’ve been thinking. It might not be enough to just smash that mirror.”

“Why, what do you mean?”

“Well, Mary’s hard to track down, right? I mean, she moves around from mirror to mirror, so who’s to say she’s not just gonna keep hiding in them forever? So maybe we should try to pin her down, you know…summon her. Summon her to her mirror and then smash it.”

“How do you know that’s going to work?” Dean says.

“I don’t,” I say quietly. “Not for sure.”

“Who’s gonna summon her?”

I close my eyes. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. I rub my temples before I say, even quieter than before, “I will. She’ll come after me.”

“What are you talking about?” Dean asks in a harsh, biting tone.

I flinch. “Well…it wouldn’t really be a secret if I told you, would it?” I whisper.

Dean’s eyes widen in shock as the reality of what I say sinks in. I push back in the seat, trying to mold myself into the black leather. I want to disappear. He’s working through it, he’s figuring out that somehow in my past I’ve been the cause of someone’s death. And not just because we’re hunters.

“No. I don’t like it.” He shakes his head. I can’t tell if he’s trying to shake off the knowledge that I have a secret or shake off the idea of me summoning Mary. “It’s not gonna happen, forget it.”

“Dean, that girl back there is going to die unless we do something about it. And who knows how many more people are gonna die after that?” I ball up my hands into fists, finding the nerve to be demanding with the most hard-headed guy on the planet. “Now, we’re doing this. You’ve got to let me do this.”

“No!” Dean shouts. The deep timbre of his voice makes that one word reverberate off of the windows in the car in an unnerving way. “I’m not going to let you sacrifice yourself over this.”

“But you do it all the time!” I shout back.

Dean opens his mouth to retaliate, then shuts it again. He does that a few times, looking like a fish out of water. He’s lost for words. I take advantage of that.

“If we do this right, if we smash the mirror in time, I won’t get hurt,” I say calmly.

He closes his eyes for a moment, then shakes his head. “I don’t like this.”

I don’t say anything. I wonder how things would be if the tables were turned. He would go charging into that antique shop with a crowbar yelling _“Bloody Mary!”_ at the top of his lungs. He wouldn’t let me stop him. Just like he wouldn’t have let me stop him going after the wendigo if I had tried.

“There it is,” he says quietly.

Across the street is Estate Antiques. We scout out the place for about an hour, waiting for the owner to lock up and leave. The shop isn’t in a particularly busy area, which makes it better for us because there’s less witnesses and a smaller chance of being seen.

A small man comes out through the front door, locks it, and walks down the street in the opposite direction of where we’re sitting.

“Let’s go,” Dean says when the man has rounded a corner three blocks over.

We jog across the street in the rain and up to the door, crowbars and flashlights in hand. I kneel down and pick the lock while Dean covers my back. The lock is old; it gives way easily. We step inside.

“Well, that’s just great,” Dean groans.

There must be a good hundred mirrors packed into the shop, all of varying shapes, sizes, and designs. Dean takes the photo of the mirror that Detective Brady gave us from his pocket and unfolds it. I try to study the pattern carved into the frame, but as soon as I look around the shop, I think I see about twenty different mirrors that could be the one.

“All right, let’s start looking,” Dean says tiredly.

We turn on our flashlights and split up. I try to focus on mirrors that are at least close to the same height and width, then go from there. I keep finding things about them that are wrong, though. This one has squared corners instead of rounded ones, that one has three-dimensional carvings in the frame instead of flat ones.

“Maybe they’ve already sold it,” Dean says from the other side of the room.

Just when I’m about to give up hope, I find the mirror, separated a little from the others, as if it knew I was coming.

“I don’t think so,” I call back.

Dean weaves his way through the antiques to reach me. He holds out the picture and we compare. “That’s it,” he says. He sighs and looks down at me. His eyes are pleading, begging me not to go through with my idea, but I know now that he won’t stop me. “You sure about this?”

I hand him my flashlight and step up to the mirror. “Bloody Mary.” I turn back to Dean. He gives me an unsure look. I grip the crowbar like a baseball bat. “Bloody Mary.”

A bright light shines through the front windows of the shop. “I’ll go check that out,” Dean says. “Stay here, be careful.”

I ready the crowbar.

“Smash anything that moves,” he orders before crawling away towards the front door. A few moments later, I hear him mutter, “Crap.”

I try to tune him out. Ignore any noises. I have one Bloody Mary left. Two more words that, if I don’t time them right, can lead to my death.

“Bloody Mary,” I say, loud and clear.

A whisper of a breath shoots past my ear. I instinctively turn towards the sound, my attention drawn to a mirror a few feet over. There’s a reflection of a mangled and bloody dark-haired girl in a dirty white dress in the glass. She glares at me, her head kinking oddly to the side. I raise my crowbar. Just as I’m about to swing, she vanishes.

Out of the corner of my eye I see a small movement. Instead of turning my body, assessing the situation, then swinging, I twist my hands tight around the crowbar and swing it at the mirror behind me in one fluid motion, whether she’s in that one or not. The glass shatters to the ground, but Mary wasn’t in the mirror.

She smiles, taunting me in a different mirror now. I smash that one, too, to no avail. I face her mirror again. “Come on,” I mutter. “Come into this one.”

The only thing I see in the mirror is my reflection. I stare at it intently; I won’t break concentration. Sooner or later she has to come to this mirror. Maybe I’ll end up smashing all the mirrors in the shop before she does, but she’ll come.

Blood begins to trickle out of my eye in the reflection. I gasp and reach up to wipe it off. Logically, my reflection should do the same. Instead, it stays still. I step closer, but the girl in the mirror doesn’t. A wave of distress courses through me and my throat swells. It isn’t long before I gasp for air. I watch the girl in the mirror laugh. I watch myself laugh at me.

Air won’t seem to go into my lungs no matter how much I try to inhale. A searing pain shoots through my heart and I drop the crowbar, clutching my chest. As oxygen seeps out of my body the veins on my face and neck become more prominent, looking like long, green-black webs entwining me.

“It’s your fault,” my reflection says spitefully. “You killed him. You killed Logan.”

I fall to my knees. I want to keel over, but something draws me to the mirror, forcing my eyes to stay locked on the evil depiction of me. I still can’t breathe. My hand reaches out, searching for the crowbar.

“You killed your own brother because you couldn’t listen,” my reflection hisses. “You wanted to prove that you were better than everyone, that you didn’t need anyone to tell you what to do. What good did that do? Your baby brother had his brains splattered on the wall and your mother slit her wrists out of grief. You can’t get anything right, can you? You’re the reason your entire family is dead. You couldn’t even save your father as he was slaughtered right in front of you!”

My eyes roll back into my head. I haven’t taken a proper breath in over a minute now. My lungs are burning and my heart feels like it’s being continuously electrocuted. Suddenly, I want to die. I want it all to end. Let her take my eyes, I don’t care. I don’t care about anything. I don’t deserve to live when my family is dead because of me.

A loud shattering sound pierces my ears and I fall backwards on the floor. My lungs expand painfully when I take in a large, raspy gulp of air.

“Harley!”

I know that voice.

“Come on, Harley, wake up.”

My head is no longer on the floor, but I don’t understand why. I didn’t get up. My cheeks start stinging and I find enough strength to swat away whatever is causing it. I open my eyes.

Dean hovers over me. He slaps my cheek one last time in a final effort to bring me to consciousness. “God, are you okay?”

“Possibly,” I croak.

“Come on.”

He helps me to my feet. My ears ring from the pressure in my head from lack of oxygen, but through the ringing I can hear a faint, rough noise, like a sack being drug through broken glass.

“Hear that?” I manage to ask in a hoarse voice.

We turn around and see Mary crawling out of her broken mirror, the one Dean smashed. She robotically gets to her feet and inches her way towards us. She flicks her hand and Dean and I fall to the ground. The closer she gets, the more intense a burning sensation grows behind my eyes. I feel the blood start to drip again. Dean’s eyes are bleeding as well.

Dean struggles to roll over. He stretches his arm out, reaching for a mirror that had fallen and cracked on the floor. He lifts it up, directing it right at Mary. She becomes distracted by her own reflection.

“You killed them!” a young girl shrieks. Most likely Mary’s reflection. “All those people! You killed them!”

The real Mary, or the non-reflection Mary, grips her throat and starts choking. She stumbles and begins to fall, and as her body drops to the floor she seems to melt into a pile of blood and shards of glass like diamonds. How ironic.

Dean tosses the mirror off of him and it crashes into fragments. He sits up and pulls me up with him. We stay there on the floor, surrounded by broken frames, shattered glass. Somehow, Dean finds a reason to laugh.

“Hey, Harley?”

“Yeah?”

“This has got to be like…what? Six-hundred years of bad luck?”

I laugh weakly but cut it short. The action burns my throat.

He scoots himself closer to me. “Are you okay, though?”

“I’m fine.”

“You know I’m going to ask you about what you saw, right?” he says.

“It’s probably not a good idea to chit-chat in the middle of a crime scene,” I point out.

“Hmm,” Dean grumbles, not pleased with my evasion of the subject. He knows I’m right. We struggle to our feet and head for the door.

“Holy hell, Dean, what did you do?” I gasp. My voice is still a little bit hoarse, so I don’t sound as stunned as I really am.

Parked in front of the shop with the driver’s and passenger’s side doors open is a police car. In front of the car are two unconscious cops.

Dean nods his head to the side, shrugging slightly, and says, “Yeah, well,” with a big grin that forms laughter lines at the edges of his mouth.

I scoff lightly, shaking my head with a smile. “You’re unbelievable.”

The Impala waits for us across the street, sparkling with raindrops that reflect the moon in each drop. Dean drives us back to the hotel so we can get Charlie and take her home. When Dean pulls up in front of our room, I go to the door while he keeps the engine running. Charlie is still huddled on the bed, but she slowly lifts her head when I call her name.

“Is it over?” she whispers.

I nod. “Yeah, it’s over.”

It starts to drizzle on the way to Charlie’s house. I can see her with her head against the back window through the side mirror. She looks terrible. I feel bad for her. Her world will never be the same again. Dean and I basically helped destroy any sense of security she may have had, now that she knows ghosts and spirits exist. And not only do they exist, they’re capable of murder.

The car idles when we stop in front of Charlie’s house. She gets out and leans down. “Thank you,” she says sincerely.

“No problem,” Dean says.

Charlie turns around to walk away, but I call her back. “Look, your boyfriend’s death…you really should try to forgive yourself. No matter what you did, you probably couldn’t have stopped it. Sometimes bad things just happen.”

She smiles faintly before turning around again. This time she doesn’t look back, not even before she walks through her front door.

Dean gently shoves me. “That’s good advice.”

I run my hand through my hair, pulling the long strands away from my face. Fatigue washes over me as the events of the past couple of hours finally hit, and they hit hard.

Dean lets me shower first when we get back to our room. I turn the knob all the way to the left for hot water. I hang my head down and let the scorching hot spray relax the muscles in my neck, my back. I didn’t expect to have to dig up the memories of my past that I’ve been burying for years. And they didn’t just get dug up. They got dragged out and thrown in my face by a murderous spirit that looked just like me.

I don’t want to get out of the shower. I want to get lost in the water, drown out my thoughts. Hell, I’d take drowning in general right now – even though that’s one of my worst fears – to escape the pain. Not only do I have to work on getting over what I did as a child again, I have to tell Dean. We basically kill things for a living, but I don’t think he’ll be so accepting of the deaths of the humans that I was responsible for.

There’s a knock on the bathroom door. “Harley? You alive in there?”

“Yeah.” My voice sounds strained and it cracks a little. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

I finish rinsing my hair and turn off the water. I don’t have the energy to get dressed. There’s a long hotel robe hanging on the hook behind the door, so I just throw that on and tie the belt around my waist. My hair is going un-brushed as well, since I can’t seem to be able to lift my arms high enough to get a comb through it.

Dean’s eyes follow me as I walk from the bathroom to the bed and sit against the headboard with my knees pulled to my chest. I can’t bear to face him. I hope the reason he ignores me and heads for the shower is because he can sense that I don’t feel like talking.

I haven’t moved an inch when Dean returns to the room, showered but fully dressed in clean clothes. He sits down at the table and leans back in the chair. The beating of my heart increases and my skin becomes more flushed the longer we sit in silence, because I know the silence can only lead to one thing.

“Harley?”

It’s not that hard to stay silent since every inch of my body feels heavy with weariness, almost like I’m losing the will to function properly. I wonder if I stay quiet long enough Dean will stop trying to get me to speak. Kind of like giving up on making those British guards in front of Buckingham Palace talk or laugh.

That was just wishful thinking, I guess.

Dean rises from the chair and sits on the edge of the other bed instead. He leans forward, his elbows on his knees, hands clasped together. “Now that this is all over, I want you to tell me what your secret is,” he says.

I’m compelled to give my head the slightest shake. There’s no compassion for my current state in his tone. He wants answers, and he wants them now.

“Harley,” he says, more aggressively than before.

“Stop,” I whisper feebly. “I can’t.”

“You’re not going to get any better unless you talk about it,” he says.

“You avoid anything touchy-feely, emotional, confrontational, so don’t you dare try to get me to talk about my feelings,” I snap at him with a sudden burst of energy.

“This is different.” He makes a tremendous effort to stay calm, which is surprising. “You’re going to spiral out of control, Harley. I can already see it. If you just talk about it, just once, you’ll be able to move on.”

“Well, thank you, Doctor Phil,” I snarl sarcastically.

The muscles in Dean’s jaw twitch when he grinds his teeth together. He presses his hands against his knees as he stands up, then throws his arms out to the sides. “Forget it, then. I’m not going to try to help you.”

“I never asked for your help, Dean,” I say angrily.

He’s quiet for a moment, his nostrils flaring. “I don’t see why you can’t just get it off your chest–”

“Fine!” I shout. He jumps back. “Fine! You want to know so badly, I’ll tell you what that bitch in the mirror said to me! She said it was all my fault! It’s my fault that my family is dead!” I twist my legs around and kneel on the bed, resting back on my ankles. “You tell me to just _talk_ about it, as if repeating what I did out loud will make it all better!”

“It can’t be your fault that your family died,” Dean says. He’s angry, but he holds back. “Mary just says it’s your fault to make you feel guilty.”

I laugh hysterically. “You think so, huh? Mary didn’t see shades of gray, remember? I killed my little brother!” I scream. The look of abhorrence that flashes across Dean’s face is exactly what I expected. “My dad had started to teach me how to shoot when I was seven. I had been begging him to for about a year. I got pretty good really fast. He only let me use handguns, though. I was too little for anything bigger.

“I was watching my dad clean his guns one day. I don’t remember why, but after he cleaned his shotgun he loaded it. We were probably going to have a lesson or something. Then the doorbell rang and distracted him. He looked at me sternly and said, ‘Do not touch ANYTHING.’ So what did I do? I picked up the shotgun. I aimed it around the room as a joke, pretended I was hunting.”

My throat painfully tightens up and tears well in my eyes, blurring my vision. Dean still looks horrified, but a little less so for some reason.

“My baby brother was sitting on the floor in the kitchen, chewing on a teething ring. He had just learned to sit up.” Tears are now practically pouring out of my eyes, rolling down into my mouth, down my neck. “I dropped the shotgun and it went off. I fell to the floor because the sound scared me. When I looked up…” I close my eyes and my lips quiver as I try to take in a breath. “There was blood and brains all over the wall. Pieces of his skull scattered around him. There was nothing left of his head.” I sit back down so I can bury my face in my knees and sob.

“You had a little brother?” Dean asks incredulously. I can hear the resentment in his voice, see it in his face. The older-sibling duty to take care of the younger one is something Dean takes very seriously. The fact that I not only neglected to take care of my little brother, but actually killed him, is something that wouldn’t be forgivable in Dean’s eyes.

“Yeah, I did,” I say, fighting the nausea building up in my stomach. “His name was Logan.”

Dean furrows his eyebrows, confused. He puts his hands on his waist, shifts his weight on his back foot. “We told each other everything when we were kids. How could you never tell me that you had a brother?”

“I wanted to tell you, Dean. But what was I supposed to say when you asked where he was? He was a baby! And I KILLED HIM!” I shout. “I BLEW MY BABY BROTHER’S HEAD OFF BECAUSE I COULDN’T LISTEN TO MY FATHER!”

The fierce, accusing look on his face slowly fades away. “That was an accident,” he says quietly. “You can’t blame yourself for that.”

I raise my head, furious, because he keeps trying to say it wasn’t my fault when it was. “My mom killed herself because she couldn’t handle the grief!” I yell at him. “Tell me how it’s not my fault that at the age of seven I already had the blood of two people on my hands!”

“I can’t,” he says quietly.

“Are you happy now?” I shout. “You wanted me to talk, so I talked. Anything else I can do to please you at the expense of my mental health?”

“Harley, keeping it bottled up inside wasn’t going to help.”

“Oh, because you’re the expert on letting things out!” I yell. “You’re such a hypocrite, Dean. All you do is bury your problems deeper and deeper inside you and refuse to talk about them, whether it’s because your problems make you feel pathetic or because you need an excuse to stay angry so you have something to unleash on the monsters that you kill. Or maybe you keep it all inside so you can feel like the troubled bad boy and use that as a ploy to sleep with girls. Then you go and drink your sorrows away as if that will make things better. Whatever your reasons are, it didn’t give you the right to try to make me talk when I didn’t want to.”

Dean narrows his eyes at me, mouth open slightly in incredulity. I’ve honestly never seen him look so angry. His face turns red from his struggle not to lash out and he’s got his fists balled up as if he’s ready to take a swing at me, and I wouldn’t blame him if he did. I totally crossed the line.

“Dean, I’m sorry–” I begin, but nothing I can say can take back what has already been said. He grabs his jacket and storms out of the room, slamming the door shut behind him.

I cringe at the sound. Intense nausea bubbles up from my stomach into my chest and little pinpricks of ice travel across my skin, piercing me from the inside out. It’s that sickly feeling I get when I immediately regret not being able to reign in my anger.

Dean’s gone. Now there’s nothing for me to do except wallow in my misery.

I need a drink.

There’s a liquor store on the corner of the street. I grab some cash and my ID and head outside in bare feet and a bathrobe.

The Impala’s gone and it’s raining but I don’t care. I barely notice as I slowly become soaked to the skin. I arrive at the liquor store dripping wet and receive ogling stares from the clerk and the only other customer in the store.

As if I wasn’t pissed off enough already, the stupid place only has the cheapest whiskey in stock. No Jim Beam, no Wild Turkey. Whatever. Cheap will still get the job done. I already push it, stupidly thinking I can drink a whole bottle in one night, but I still buy two. Better safe than sorry.

I practically run back to the hotel room. Once I’m inside I shut the door and lean back against it, resting my head on the wood. I sigh deeply and open up a whiskey, taking a couple of swigs straight from the bottle.

There aren’t any glasses in the room so I end up drinking from a coffee mug. I curl up on the bed again, bottle in one hand, mug in the other. I turn the radio on so I don’t have to feel so alone. Rush’s ‘Fly by Night’ is on, but it’s almost over.

This is all my fault. I was the one who found that stupid case about the guy with the exploded eyeballs in the first place. If I wouldn’t have been so eager to make Dean feel better by finding him something to work on, I wouldn’t be sitting here preparing to wash out my blood with alcohol.

After drinking a couple of large shots I start to cry. That’s when I know I’m really messed up. I hate to cry. It makes me feel weak. Then I remind myself, I can’t feel weak if I can’t feel anything at all. So I throw back another shot.

It gets harder and harder to keep my head up when it starts to feel like a bowling ball is attached to the top of my spine. My vision gets a little bit hazy and I keep seeing black every once in a while even though my eyes stay open. I feel like I have to go to the bathroom but I know I can’t support my own weight long enough to get me there. But I have to try or run the risk of going right there in my robe.

After a couple of drunken attempts to set the mug and bottle on the nightstand I finally manage to get them to stay. But it looks like I put down three of each. When did I get that many mugs? I steady myself until the bottle of whiskey stops moving and I’m able to see that the level of the brown liquid is almost at the bottom.

I drag my legs to the edge of the bed. They feel like lead, and they weigh me down like lead as soon as I try to stand. I slowly crawl to the bathroom and somehow manage to work out the knot in the belt of the bathrobe so I can open it and sit on the toilet.

Getting up and moving around seemed to help a little bit. I stagger back to the nightstand and drain the last of the whiskey. I shake the bottle upside down for good measure, just to make sure I got it all. There’s got to be another bottle around here somewhere. I know I bought two. I think. My head swivels back and forth, making it seem as if it isn’t attached to my body anymore, as I scan the room until my eyes focus on a bottle next to a crumpled up brown bag on the table across the room.

I scowl at it. Why does it have to be so far away?

I lean over the other bed and inch my way to the table. When my fingers grasp the cool glass neck of the bottle I gain a little bit of strength, enough to get me back to my bed. I sit down and pop the top, spilling some of the whisky on my chest. The liquid rolls down my stomach, and that confuses me. One glance down tells me why. I never tied up the robe. I give a lazy attempt to cover myself up. Who the hell cares if I’m dressed. Dean’s probably not coming back anyway.

I can’t tell if I’ve sat on the bed for a couple more hours or a couple more minutes when the door to the hotel bangs open and Dean stumbles in, his head and shoulders drooping. From what I can see through my hazy eyes, he looks about as drunk as I feel.

Why was Dean gone? Did he go to get more whiskey?

I sit up and scoot to the edge of the bed while he wobbles his way over. He sits down next to me and braces his hands on his knees, keeping himself propped up. I silently offer him my bottle. He takes a swig and then reaches over me to put it on the night stand. As he slowly backs away, he slips his hand along the side of my neck and pulls my face to his.

My senses are both heightened and totally impaired, which is why I can feel how soft Dean’s lips are against mine but I can’t totally process the kiss. It’s like I’m out of my body and in it at the same time, looking at Dean and I on the bed as well as sensing him next to me.

Dean’s mouth opens slightly as our lips move together, and I can feel his breath against my mouth. He keeps one hand on the back of my head, gripping my hair, and his other hand finds my open robe. One moment I can feel the fabric on my skin and the next moment a rush of cold hits my naked body, but I can’t find the memory of actually taking off the robe.

I find myself pushing Dean’s wet leather jacket off of his shoulders. He takes his hands off of me just long enough to free his arms. I lift up his top shirt and our lips break away for just a moment so he can slip the two shirts he has on over his head. I wrap my arms around his neck and blindly search for his mouth with my own. Dean pulls me closer to him until his bare chest is against mine, and the feeling sends tingles through my body.

He grabs my thigh and guides my leg across his body. My butt rubs against his pants and I frown because it doesn’t feel like his skin. Dean pulls away, the downwards formation of my lips throwing him off. I cup my hands around his face and pull him back into a deep kiss while I rotate my hips on his lap, against his pants. He slides his hands down to my butt and squeezes it. I let out a small squeal and he laughs against my lips.

I know that I’m drunk. I know that Dean’s drunk. Aside from that, my brain can only register our actions, and the arbitrary thought that ‘Movin’ On’ by Bad Company plays on the radio. I know what feels good, what doesn’t feel good, but in a sexual way. There’s no calculating thought process working through all the different emotions that usually come with sex. The whiskey erased all that. It’s kind of nice to just focus on the what without worrying about the why.

He effortlessly picks me up and pushes me back on the bed. His warm body weighs down on mine for a moment before he sort of rolls to the side so he’s able to kiss my lips, my neck, and down between my breasts while propped up on one arm and caress the rest of my body with his other hand.

My fingers find the waistband of his pants and I lightly tug on it, lowering it a couple of inches. Dean’s chest and torso are bare except for the Samulet swinging from his neck and the small trail of hair running from just under his belly button and disappearing down into his pants.

Instead of going from the inside right away, I run my hands along his hips, his thighs, slowly working my way inward until I feel the bulge in his pants. Now it’s his turn to moan as I rub him, feeling him harden even more.

Dean crushes his mouth down in a heavy kiss before he rolls to the side of the bed and pulls off his pants and shoes. He lays back down on top of me, only this time I can feel him between my hips. I run my fingers through his hair and we kiss passionately while he gently rocks his hips back and forth, teasing me down there.

I giggle when Dean’s mouth travels down my neck. The tingling sensation grows stronger in the lower half of my body so I spread my legs a little wider. He readjusts his knees, backing up just a bit so that when he comes forward, he pushes inside me.

I was already blacking out here and there up until this point, but after he starts moving faster and harder inside of me, everything becomes a haze of our passionate kisses and sweating bodies. I can’t keep track of when we move because all of our positions blur together – one moment he is on top of me, the next I am on top of him. At some point he bends me over the side of the bed and comes at me from behind. He grips my shoulders and pulls me back so he can get himself as deep as he can until he finishes inside of me.

The longer I stay up the more I start to forget. Like how I know Dean and I are having sex, but what we do exactly isn’t clear. But I’m aware of Dean kissing me once he and I are done and lying next to each other on the bed. But it isn’t like our heated kisses from before. It’s slow, soft. Then he turns on to his back and holds out an arm for me so I can snuggle in close to him. I fall asleep quickly and contentedly.


	4. Something Wicked

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John sends Dean and Harley to Fitchburg, Wisconsin to hunt down the monster he and Mark Cooper failed to kill.
> 
> Harley and Dean struggle to find harmony in their hunting relationship and personal relationship. New partners are hard, and now they're both trying to do the job they've done for years with their fathers all alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't particularly care for this chapter. I tried hard to delete it but I couldn't. Everything surrounding the case itself is good development for the story, but just know this chapter isn't my favorite. It's like, my second least favorite. Read on to figure out which is at the very bottom of my list.

When I wake up, I honestly don’t know where I am for a moment. There’s ringing in my ears louder than the bells in Vatican City and the pounding in my head is like a thousand horses’ hooves galloping at top speed. I can barely open my eyes and when I finally do, I wish I hadn’t.

Dean and I are curled up around each other, completely naked.

I let my head fall back on the bed and regret it immediately. “Oh, God,” I groan, once the shooting pains subside.

“Hmm?” Dean rubs his face and opens his eyes, which immediately widen once he sees us on the same bed. “We, uh, got drunk and had sex?”

“Apparently….You remember any of it?”

“Parts of it,” Dean admits. “You?”

“Very little.”

His eyes scan down and up my body. I have one leg hooked over his, my knee just inches away from my new most favorite part of his body, and my head rests in the crook of his arm. This entire situation should be bothering me, bothering him, or at least making us slightly uncomfortable, but for some reason he hasn’t shoved me off.

“Man, I’ve got one bad hangover,” Dean groans.

“So do I. What did you end up drinking?” I ask.

He laughs. “I don’t freaking remember. Just told the bartender to keep ’em coming.” He looks at the nightstand where my indulgences from last night sit as a reminder of my weakness. “I see you had a bottle and a half of bourbon. I gotta hand it to you, I think you beat me.”

I smile faintly. The drinking isn’t what I’m so concerned about. I need to figure out what Dean remembers of yesterday, because frankly, I don’t remember much. I think we argued. That’s about it. But if he doesn’t bring it up, I won’t either.

The next thing I have to worry about is what happens next. I hate to be the girl that needs to verbalize where we stand, what we are. Maybe I can find some clever way to ask just enough to make it sound like I’m only concerned for our safety as hunting partners. Which is really what it’s all about, to be honest. Well, at least it is in my head. Dean was the first boy I kissed, the first boy I had a crush on, and even though we were separated for ten years those feelings never went away. Seeing him again only proved that. Now, we’ve slept together, and even though it was a drunken mistake, I won’t be able to forget it.

Falling into a false sense of security lying here with Dean makes the pain in my heart worse when he casually gets out of bed without so much as a kiss, a slight gesture to acknowledge last night.

“All right, time to get up and hit the road,” he says.

He heads for the shower and I stay in the bed, pulling the sheets around me, as if being wrapped in their cocoon will help erase the memories, the bad ache growing in my chest.

I look across the room and Dean materializes in front of the TV as a wispy figure in my mind. His face is twisted in pain, as if listening to something that hurts him. Then my voice echoes in my head: “Or maybe you keep it all inside so you can feel like the troubled bad boy and use that as a ploy to sleep with girls. Then you go and drink your sorrows away as if that will make things better.”

I groan and bury my face in my hands. Of course he wouldn’t show any sense of romanticism for me, not after I called him out like that. It probably took all of his strength this morning not to just jump out of bed as soon as he woke up.

Over the next few weeks, things stay civil between Dean and I. We find a couple of cases: a vengeful spirit that was killing young women having affairs with married men in Arkansas, a poltergeist haunting a newlywed couple in Nebraska, a bearwalker eating hikers in northern Michigan. We work together flawlessly now. I wasn’t so quick to think things were back to normal, though, or even better than normal since absolutely nothing went wrong – no quarreling about a case, about which road to take, what to eat for dinner. It’s fucking eerie.

The only time a slight bit of tension arose was when Dean attempted to contact John. He tried a couple of times and left a message each time. He even sent him a few text messages, though he said it was basically pointless since his dad barely knew how to use a toaster. My heart went out to Dean each time I watched his face turn from eager to dejected as he waited for his dad to pick up, only to reach the voicemail instead.

It honestly baffles me how John Winchester could ignore his son. He sent Dean off on his first hunt alone and didn’t even bother to check in to see how he was doing. It’s been almost a month since we parted ways at the Roadhouse and still John hasn’t made contact.

Until today.

Dean and I are at a diner in Iowa having dinner when his phone trills. He flips it open, stares for a moment, then holds it out to me without a word. I look at the text on the screen. Unknown number. The only message content is “43-89”.

“Three weeks of nothing, then I get this,” he says angrily. He throws the phone down on the table. It bounces and skids off a plate, landing on the booth next to me.

I hold my cup of coffee between my hands and take small sips, just for something to do because I don’t know what to say to him. Things haven’t been the same with us since that night and I don’t feel like it’s my place to say anything, even if it’s something good.

“I can’t believe this,” he grumbles. “Where’s your laptop?”

“In my backpack in the trunk,” I say.

Dean slides to the end of the booth and angrily stands up. His thigh collides with the corner of the table, making it rock back and forth. His soda spills over and drips down on the floor. He curses and storms out of the diner. I sigh and mop up the mess with some napkins.

He returns with my laptop, still visibly irritated but taking a little more care as he sits down. “It’s Fitchburg, Wisconsin,” he says, slamming my laptop closed a minute later. I clamp my mouth shut so I’m a little less tempted to yell at him to be careful with it. “Coordinates to a case.”

“Are we going to go?” I ask cautiously.

Dean purses his lips and shakes his head slightly. “I don’t know. Might as well. We can head out in the morning.” He looks around at our mostly empty plates. “Ready to go?”

“Sure,” I say. Hopefully this walking-on-eggshells thing will end soon.

It will take a little less than half a day to get to Fitchburg. We drive on back roads with the windows rolled down, Styx playing through the speakers. It almost feels like it was before, as long as we don’t talk. I’m not sure how much longer I can deal with the change.

Then, a disturbing yet freeing thought hits me: I don’t have to stay with Dean.

I steal a sideways glance at him. His hand is draped casually over the steering wheel but his face is set like stone, staring out at the road in anger.

Now I’m left to wonder: Could I actually leave him?

“So tell me what you found in Fitchburg,” Dean says.

“I told you, there was nothing,” I say. I did a search this morning during breakfast.

“You probably missed something, then,” Dean says agitatedly. I try my best not to take it personally.

“Dean, I ran LexisNexis, local police reports, newspapers. I couldn’t find a single red flag. Are you sure the coordinates your dad gave you were about an actual case?”

“Of course.” Dean grinds his teeth together. “Dad wouldn’t send me coordinates if it wasn’t important.”

“Well, I’m telling you I looked and all I could find was a big, steamy pile of nothing,” I say, a little frustrated. Nothing more is said between us.

We drive in silence until we cruise past a welcome sign for Fitchburg, population 20,501. Dean stops in front of a place called Glasow’s Diner to see if the locals have noticed anything that hasn’t made the papers.

I hang around outside, leaning against the hood of the Impala, staring at a playground across the street. It seems like a decent park, great for kids. It’s got a jungle gym in the center of a woodchip pit, the kind Dean and I would take Sam to if there was one near our motel. There’s a swing set, those little animals on thick springs stuck in the ground. I cross my arms over my chest. I really don’t think there’s a case here, but the longer I stare at the playground, the more I start to think that’s not true.

Dean comes out of the diner holding two travel cups. He hands one to me. “Well, the waitress thinks the local freemasons are up to something sneaky but other than that, no one’s heard about anything freaky going on,” he says. He takes a drink of his coffee.

“Dean, you got the time?” I ask. I still haven’t broken my gaze. There’s a single little girl playing on the jungle gym while a woman, presumably the girl’s mom, watches from a bench.

He checks the black Smith & Wesson SWAT watch on his wrist. “Ten after four. Why?”

I nod in the direction of the park. “What’s wrong with this picture?”

Dean’s eyes scan the almost deserted area before us. He picks up the strangeness quicker than I did. “School’s out, isn’t it?”

“Yeah…So where is everybody? This place should be crawling with kids right now.”

“Hmm.” He takes another swig of coffee before walking over to the mom.

A cold breeze drifts through the air, whipping my hair around my face and sending chills down my spine. The way the wind blows the nearly bare trees and sends the orange and brown leaves swirling to the ground is almost spooky in this setting.

Dean’s deep voice is strong enough to carry back to where I stand propped against the Impala, but I can’t hear what the woman says.

“Sure is quiet out here,” Dean says to her. The woman responds, and he asks, “Why’s that?” He nods his head solemnly to her answer and says, “How many?” which doesn’t make any sense.

Dean heads back over to the Impala. “So there might not be reported cases in police databases or newspapers, but there’s definitely something going on.”

“Why, what’s up?”

“The woman over there says kids have been getting sick.” Dean leans back against the hood next to me. “Just five or six right now, but it’s pretty serious. They’re all in the hospital. Parents are freaking out because they think it’s catching.”

“Let’s check out the hospital. We could be from the CDC. Seems logical enough.”

“Sounds good,” Dean says. He pats the hood and we get in the car.

Posing as doctors from the Center for Disease Control would require Dean and I to be better dressed than we usually are on a daily basis. We hit a Macy’s to find Dean a suit and me some sort of fancy business-like outfit.

“You’re so lucky you’re a dude,” I grumble as I flip through hanger after hanger of skirts, blazers, dresses, pants, blouses. “You don’t have to worry about all this shit. Grab a suit, choose a tie and _bam_ , you’re good to go.”

“Just pick something and go try it on. We’re losing daylight.”

I grab a random blouse and blazer that match, as well as a skirt and a pair of pants. I’m honestly not trying to go for the pant suit look, but it would be a lot harder to run in a skirt if we get ourselves into trouble. The skirt seems to win my approval more than the pants, though, mainly because the pants are just repulsive, but not by much. I don’t do skirts. I do jeans and boots. I walk out of the dressing room to show Dean my navy blue outfit. I hang my head, embarrassed.

“I feel stupid,” I mumble.

“Aw, come on, it’s not that bad,” Dean says with a chuckle, trying to comfort me but failing. “I think it’s cute.”

“Yeah, yeah.” But my heart still flutters for a moment. If it were possible, I’d rip my heart out of my chest, smack it and scold it for acting like that and tricking my brain into thinking things are okay just because Dean can joke around.

“Aren’t you going to get dressed?” I ask.

“Yeah, but I didn’t know how long you were going to take and I don’t want to be stuck in this monkey suit any longer than I have to.” He gathers his attire and takes the room I just vacated.

I sit down on one of the poufs and put on what the sales lady calls “sensible heels”. Sensible my ass. It’s like I’m strapping time bombs to my feet. At any moment they’ll make me fall and break my ankles or something.

“Man, I feel like one of the Blues Brothers,” Dean groans.

At the sound of the squeaky hinges of the door opening, I look up. As I lift my head, it’s like everything descends into slow motion. Cue _Sharp Dressed Man_ by ZZ Top.

Dean walks out in a black suit, adjusting his green striped tie at the neck. He runs his hands along the length of the lapels of the suit, almost like he’s popping the collar of his leather jacket, and fastens the top button.

My jaw drops. Hot _Damn!_

I thought he looked hot in his leather jacket and jeans, but now he’s just downright sexy. Despite his size, the shoulders of the jacket fit him perfectly, outlining his muscles, and the pants aren’t too tight or short. The stubble on his face makes him look more sophisticated rather than haggard, and his tie brings out the green of his eyes. It’s also the first time I notice that Dean is slightly bow-legged.

He cocks his head, looking at me funny. “Harley? You okay?”

“Huh?” God, I’m practically drooling. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

I follow Dean to the cash registers, trying to cool myself off before I go crazy. I know I’m not losing my mind, though, because practically every single woman in the store turns their head as Dean and I walk by. Of course they aren’t looking at me, but still, it’s nice to hopefully instill jealousy in some of them.

Dane County Memorial Hospital is a long brick building with only three floors. Dean parks outside of the main entrance and digs through his glove compartment.

“Ah, here we go,” he says, handing me an identification card.

I look at it and scoff. “Dude, I am not using this ID.”

“Why not?” Dean says with a huge grin.

“Because it says ‘Bikini Inspector’ on it!” I squeal. “What’s the point of dressing professionally if we don’t have the badges to prove it?”

“Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”

“Oh, yeah? And what are you going to use?”

Dean shrugs and gets out of the car. “I don’t have an ID card for this.”

I groan and follow him into the hospital.

The main lobby is bustling with people – patients, doctors, nurses, other staff. Maybe we’ll be able to get by without detection minus my having to use this pathetic excuse for a badge.

The reception desks looms closer and I chicken out and duck away from Dean, making a run for the exit. He grabs my arm and spins me back around.

“Oh, no you don’t,” he says. “Get up there and check us in.”

“Why can’t you do it?” I complain. But deep down, I know why. This is part of my punishment for what I said to Dean a few weeks ago. He’s not really holding a grudge; instead, he’s taking advantage of my guilt. “You’ve already got me in this stupid skirt and heels, now I have to walk up to a female receptionist with an ID card saying I’m a bikini inspector?”

“Maybe she’s into chicks and will find it amusing,” Dean says with a dreamy look on his face. I punch his arm. “Ow, okay. Jeeze. I’m sure she won’t look that close. Hell, she won’t even ask to see it. It’s all about confidence, Harley,” Dean says. He grabs my shoulders and gives me a little shove to the front desk while he keeps on walking.

The receptionist looks up when I approach.

“Hi,” I say. My voice is shaking. I cough. “I’m Doctor Kim Caplin, from Disease Control.”

“Can I see some ID?” the receptionist asks.

I hear Dean snigger from down the corridor. I throw him a dirty look. “Yeah, of course,” I tell the receptionist as I flash the ID quickly. “Now, could you direct me to the pediatric ward, please?”

She blinks, then deliberates for a moment then says, “Okay, well, just go down that hall, turn left and up the stairs.”

“Thank you.”

Thank God for blondes.

Dean waits for me a little ways away, grinning. I walk up to him, eyes narrowed, brows furrowed, nostrils flared – a completely murderous look on my face.

“See, told you it would work,” Dean says with a small laugh.

“Follow me, it’s upstairs,” I growl at him.

We weave through the hallways of the hospital, passing patient room after patient room, to get to the pediatric ward. In front of one room in particular, I glance to the left and see an old, white-haired woman in a wheelchair facing the window. I keep walking, but Dean, however, decides to stop and be nosy.

“Dean!” I call.

The next corridor reveals the peds ward. It’s small, consisting of eight beds lined up behind a long glass wall, separated by curtains. Enough kids to occupy six of the beds are tucked underneath piles of blankets, hooked up to multiple tubes and machines. Each kid is pale, sickly looking, as if they’re on the brink of death.

It’s a quarantine room.

Dean finds a doctor’s lounge and pokes his head inside. He locates the doctor that’s in charge of the kids and asks to speak with him. We wait for him in front of the peds room.

“They look awful,” I say quietly.

“Yeah,” Dean agrees.

The doctor comes out of the lounge and walks over to us.

“Thank you for seeing us, Doctor Heidecker,” Dean says.

“Well, I’m glad you guys are here,” Dr. Heidecker says. “I was just about to call the CDC myself. How’d you find out, anyways?”

“Oh, some GP, I forget his name, he called Atlanta and must have beat you to the punch.” Dean flashes a smile.

“So you’ve got six cases so far?” I ask the doctor.

“Yeah, in five weeks.” Dr. Heidecker looks through the glass and shakes his head. “At first we thought it was garden variety bacterial pneumonia. Not that newsworthy. But now, the kids aren’t responding to antibiotics. Their white cell counts keep going down. Their immune systems aren’t doing their job.”

“Is there anything to indicate something besides an infection?” I ask.

“No.” The doctor sighs dejectedly. “It’s like…their bodies are wearing out.”

A nurse arrives, holding a clipboard. “Excuse me, Doctor Heidecker.” She hands him the clipboard and they talk in low voices. Dr. Heidecker returns the clipboard and she walks away.

“You ever see anything like this before?” I ask the doctor, resuming our conversation.

“Never this severe. And the way it spreads, that’s a new one for me.”

“What do you mean?”

“It works its way through families, but only the children. One sibling after the other.”

Dean and I glance at each other. His cynical face doesn’t match my thoughts. There’s plenty of supernatural creatures that prey solely on children. But then, I suppose there could be some diseases that only affect those of a younger age range as well. Only one way to find out.

“You mind if we interview a few of the kids?” Dean asks.

“They’re not conscious,” Dr. Heidecker says.

My eyes widen. “None of them?”

“No.”

“Can we, uh, can we talk to the parents?” Dean asks hopefully.

Dr. Heidecker shrugs. “If you think it will help.”

“Yeah. Who was your most recent admission?”

“Bethany Benson.” Dr. Heidecker points to a dark haired little girl in the last bed. Her parents hover close to her, holding each other.

“Thank you, Doctor,” I say. He nods and walks away.

Getting Mr. Benson away from his wife and two hospitalized daughters is very difficult. I have to take on the role of the compassionate, empathetic female because quite frankly, even in his smashing suit, Dean still looks and talks like a hard-ass.

I finally make it to the waiting room with Mr. Benson and Dean meets us halfway. No sooner has Mr. Benson taken a seat does he say, “I should get back to my girls.” Dean throws me an annoyed look.

“We understand that, and we really appreciate you talking to us,” I say in my best soothing voice. “Now, you said Samantha is the oldest?”

Mr. Benson nods. “Thirteen.”

“Okay, and she came down with it first, right? And then…?”

“Bethany, the next night.” Mr. Benson keeps eyeing the door, as if he plans to make a run for it.

“Within twenty-four hours?” Dean asks incredulously.

“I guess,” Mr. Benson says distractedly. “Look, I already went through all this with the doctor.”

“Just a few more questions, if you don’t mind,” Dean says. “How do you think they caught pneumonia? Were they out in the cold, anything like that?”

Mr. Benson gets defensive. “No,” he snaps. Then he sighs dismally, takes a few deep breaths. “We think it was an open window.”

“Both times?” I ask.

“The first time I don’t really remember, but the second time for sure.” Mr. Benson now takes a dramatic look towards the door, bending almost completely to the side to peer around me. “I know I closed it before I put Bethany to bed.”

“So you think she opened it?” I ask.

“It’s a second story window with a ledge. No one else could have.” Mr. Benson stands up. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my daughters.”

Dean and I let him go.

“You know, this might not be anything supernatural,” Dean says when we get back to the car. In his irritated huff he slams the door shut with unnecessary force. “It might actually just be pneumonia.”

“Maybe,” I agree slowly. “Or…maybe something opened that window. I don’t know, I wouldn’t believe there was anything supernatural going on here if your dad didn’t send us here. I think we may be barking up the _right_ tree.”

Our indecisiveness keeps us parked in the packed lot. I glance around at the cars, then at the hospital, to the second floor where the pediatric ward is.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” I say. “The guy we just talked to? I bet it will be a while before he goes home.”

Dean’s lips pull into a smile to match my own. “I like the way you think. Let’s ditch the monkey suits and go for a little B-and-E.”

Fitchburg is a pretty upscale city for Wisconsin. The Benson’s have a beautiful contemporary-style house surrounded by trees with a blooming garden out front. I can’t take my eyes off it, off of all the houses on the street. Just like in Toledo, a part of me wishes I could have a house, some place to call home.

Upstairs, we scan every inch of Bethany and Samantha’s room with our EMF readers. The only sound mine makes is the low hum of the battery, letting me know that it’s on.

“You got anything over there?” I ask.

Dean stops picking through the dozens of stuffed animals on one of the beds and glances around the room. “Nope, nothing.”

“Yeah, me neither,” I mutter.

There’s two windows in the room, catty-corner to each other. For good measure, I run the EMF device over the windowsill on the right again. Nothing. I scan it over the windowsill on the left. Still nothing – as far as EMF goes, though.

“Hey, Dean?” I call quietly. “I was right, it’s not pneumonia.”

Dean crosses the room and stops by my side. I point to the windowsill, where a long, black spindly-fingered handprint rests on the outside ledge of the window, decayed into the wood.

“It’s rotted,” I say. “What the hell leaves a handprint like that?”

Dean doesn’t answer. He stares at the markings with a glazed look over his eyes. He doesn’t even respond when I wave my hand in front of his face.

“Dean?” I say. I give his shoulder a little shake.

“I know why my dad sent us here,” he finally says. “He’s faced this thing before. He wants us to finish the job.”

“What?” I say dubiously.

“Come on, let’s get out of here. I’ll explain outside.”

Dean doesn’t give me the chance to ask any further questions. We gather our things and leave the Benson house.

“This thing, it’s a shtriga,” he says, slowing the Impala on Main Street to browse out of his window in search of a motel.

I scan the buildings on my side of the street. “What the hell is a shtriga?”

“Kind of like a witch, I think. I don’t know much about them.”

“Didn’t your dad tell you about them if he fought one before?”

“Not really. It was about fourteen or fifteen years ago, he hunted one in Fort Douglas, Wisconsin. Guess he caught wind the thing’s in Fitchburg now and kicked us the coordinates.” Dean’s bad temper starts to edge its way through the good mood he’s been in so far today.

“So wait, this…”

“Shtriga,” Dean says again.

“Right, okay, you think it’s the same one that your dad hunted before?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“No offense to your dad, but if it’s the same one he went after, how come it’s still breathing?” From the look on Dean’s face, I immediately regret my question as soon as the words leave my lips.

“’Cause it got away,” Dean says through gritted teeth. “Don’t think it’s all on my dad, though. Your dad was there, too.”

“I don’t remember my dad telling me about a shtriga or whatever,” I say, trying to wrack my brain for any mention of a failed hunt. My dad has had his fair share, but I think I would have remembered the name _shtriga_ if he had mentioned it.

“Don’t know why he didn’t. But you weren’t with me and Sam that time. I don’t know where you were.”

“Hmm,” I say. “Did your dad give you any information on the thing back then?”

“No,” he says shortly. Dean pulls up to a motel and kills the engine.

“I’ll look in my dad’s journal, see if he says anything about it,” I tell him, but I get the feeling he’s not listening anymore.

The motel is a small, family-owned establishment. The reception area is homey, with a couple of green potted plants and cheerful paintings. Behind the counter is a doorway that leads to what looks like the owners’ living quarters. Two young boys are in there watching TV.

At the sound of the bell, the oldest of the two boys comes out to greet us. He can’t be more than twelve years old, and he’s adorable. Long, straight blond hair down to his chin, big blue eyes. He’ll definitely break some hearts when he’s older.

He looks Dean and I up and down. “A king or two queens?”

“Two queens,” Dean says.

The kid nods to the window. “Nice car,” he says.

A woman enters the reception area from the same direction the boy came. She smiles at us and takes over the transaction. “Hi, checking in?”

“Hi, yeah,” Dean says.

The woman looks down at the boy. “Do me a favor and go get your brother some dinner.”

“I’m helping a guest!” the kid complains.

She throws him a scolding look, to which he grimaces in return and heads back through the doorway. The woman turns to us again. “Will that be cash or credit?”

“Do you take MasterCard?” Dean asks. She nods, so he hands over a gold credit card. I wonder who’s covering the bill this time.

Dean’s head lifts to the room behind the counter and he gets that same sort of dazed, distracted look that he had back at the Benson house. The woman tries to hand the card back to him but he’s completely out of it.

“Sir?”

I give Dean’s back a little pat and he shakes his head, coming back to reality. He takes the card and the room key. “Uh, yeah. Thanks.”

Dean and I grab our stuff from the Impala and go to our room. I keep stealing sideways glances at him along the way. He just stares forward, his jaw set.

“Dean, are you okay?” I finally ask. “You keep zoning out.”

“I’m fine,” he says gruffly.

I shrug him off. If he doesn’t want to talk, he doesn’t want to talk. But it sort of pisses me off because this situation just reinforces how hypocritical he can be. He’ll make me talk when I’m upset, but he won’t let me know when something’s up with him.

We begin our research immediately after hanging up what little clothes we have in the small closet. Dean takes both our dad’s journals and slumps down on one bed. He leans back against the headboard and crosses his legs, flips through the pages.

I set up my laptop at the table and connect to the internet. It takes me quite a while to find any lore on shtrigas. Not only is the lore hard to find, shtrigas in general are very rare. But I’m not in this business because it’s a cake-walk.

“Well, you were right,” I say to Dean after a couple of hours. “It wasn’t easy to find, but you were right. Shtriga is a kind of witch. They’re Albanian, but legends about them trace back to ancient Rome. They feed off of _spiritus vitae_.”

“Spiri-what now?” Dean says.

“Vitae,” I repeat. “It’s Latin. Translates to ‘breath of life’. Kind of like your life force or essence. Some even go as far as to describe it as one’s soul.”

“Didn’t the doctor say the kids’ bodies were wearing out?”

“It’s a thought. She takes your vitality, maybe your immunity goes to hell, pneumonia takes hold.” I scroll down the webpage. “Shtriga’s can feed off anyone, but they prefer–”

“Children,” Dean says.

“Yeah,” I say, verifying that information with the lore. “Probably because they have a stronger life force. And get this – shtriga’s are ‘invulnerable to all weapons devised by God and man’.”

“No, that’s not right,” Dean says abruptly. “She’s vulnerable when she feeds.”

“What?” I say, incredulous. “Does it say that in the journal?”

Dean snaps the journal shut. “No.”

“So how do you–?”

“If you catch her when she’s eating, you can blast her with consecrated wrought iron,” he says, cutting me off and ignoring my question. “Ah, buck shots or rounds, I think.”

“How do you know that?” I say, more firmly but still cautiously.

“My dad told me,” he says in a low voice.

“I thought your dad didn’t tell you anything?”

“Well, I forgot about this,” Dean snaps.

I turn my attention back to my laptop screen. I basically beg to be murdered by continuing to ask questions. “So, uh, is there anything else he might have mentioned?”

“Nope, that’s it.”

I look back up at Dean, trying to read from his face what’s going on in his head. For some reason he’s defensive about this whole shtriga ordeal. Part of me wants to think it’s because his dad wasn’t able to kill it the first time, but that shouldn’t bother him. My dad was there, too, apparently, and it got by the both of them. Something that’s only vulnerable in such an intimate way would be hard to kill even by the most experienced hunter.

“What?” Dean asks self-consciously.

“Nothing,” I say, dropping my gaze. I had been staring at him longer than I meant to. “Okay, so assuming we can kill it when it eats, we’ve got to find the thing first. Somehow. Shtriga’s take on a human disguise when they’re not hunting.”

“What kind of human disguise?”

“Historically, something innocuous. Could be anything, but it’s usually a feeble old woman, which might be how the witches-as-old-crones legend got started,” I say, referring back to the webpage.

“Hang on,” Dean says, rolling off the bed. He grabs a map and unfolds it on the table next to me. “Check this out. I marked down all the addresses of the victims. Now, these are the houses that have been hit so far–” he points to three red X’s “–and dead center?”

“The hospital,” I say.

“Yeah. Now when we were there I saw a patient, an old woman,” Dean says excitedly, as if he’s on a hot trail.

“An old person, huh? In a hospital? Phew.” I shake my head and smile. “Better call the Coast Guard.”

“Well, listen, smart ass, she had an inverted cross hanging on her wall,” Dean says smugly.

My smile drops immediately. Dean raises an eyebrow at me and nods.

“I say we check it out tonight.”

I yawn and stretch my arms. “Okay. But if we’re going to be up all night again I’m gonna take a nap.” I close my laptop and collapse on my bed.

Around three in the morning, Dean and I drive to the hospital. We park a few blocks away because the roar of the Impala’s engine would have alerted any security or staff in the close vicinity of the parking lot. We pack a handgun each in our waistband, after Dean swapped out the steel bullets for pure wrought iron ones.

I pick the lock of an unguarded side door and we steal inside. The interior of hospitals at night is supposed to be unsettling, creepy, and that’s one of the reasons why I like to be in hospitals after business hours. But it’s been a while since I’ve needed to be in one so late and I forgot that with the brightness of the fluorescent lights and the diminishing of my innocence, it doesn’t seem all that eerie anymore.

Dean pokes his head around a corner and holds his hand up, signaling me to stop and wait. I hear voices from down the hallway. When they dissipate, Dean signals the OK for us to turn the corner and walk down the hall. The old woman’s room is only a few yards away. Dean opens the door slowly and sneaks in first, gun drawn. I hang back, my gun drawn as well.

The old woman is still in her wheelchair, facing the window, and by the measured rise and fall of her shoulders, she’s probably sleeping. Dean inches his way around her and leans in closer and closer.

Her head whips to the side faster than any old woman should be able to move. “Who the hell are you!” she screeches.

Dean jumps back, startled, and crashes against the dresser. He holds his gun up steady and looks between me and the old woman with a hilariously frightened expression on his face.

“Who’s there? You trying to steal my stuff?” She lowers her voice, grumbling to herself. “They’re always stealing around here.”

I flip on the lights and step closer to the woman. Her eyes are a milky white color, her irises barely visible. Cataracts.

“Ah, ma’am, we’re maintenance,” I say quickly. “We’re sorry. We thought you were sleeping.”

“Pah, nonsense!” she gripes. “I was sleeping with my peepers open.” Suddenly she laughs, a crackly, choking laugh. She gestures to wall. “Fix that cross, would ya? I’ve asked four damn times already!”

Dean looks at me with wide, freaked-out eyes before he gives the cross a small tap and it swings the right way up.

The biggest challenge I have right now is containing my laughter while we’re still inside the building. Since the old woman was the only lead we had as to who the shtriga could be using as a human disguise and that turned out to be a bust, we head back out to the car. As soon as we step outside I burst into a fit of laughter and Dean scowls at me.

“‘I was sleeping with my peepers open’?” I say, clutching my stomach, which has started to tighten up with the effort of laughing.

“I almost smoked that old girl, I swear,” Dean says. “It’s not funny!”

“Oh, man, you should’ve seen your face.”

“Yeah, laugh it off,” Dean grumbles. “Now we’re back to square one.”

The sun gives off a faint light by the time we get back to the motel. Sitting on a bench outside the main office is the motel owner’s elder son. He half-heartedly swings his feet with a forlorn look on his face. Dean brings the Impala around and parks in front of the kid.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Dean asks him.

“My brother is sick,” the boy says quietly.

“The little guy?”

The boy nods. “Pneumonia. He’s in the hospital. It’s my fault.”

“Oh, come on. How?” Dean attempts to say in a lighthearted tone.

“I should have made sure the window was latched,” the boy says gloomily. “He wouldn’t have got pneumonia if the window was latched.”

I feel a large pang of guilt and anger rise in my chest. That thing, the shtriga, was here last night. Within a hundred yards of our room. If Dean and I had just stayed at the motel, maybe we could have killed it.

Dean kneels down in front of the boy. “Listen to me. I can promise you that this is not your fault. Okay?”

“It’s my job to look after him,” the boy says.

I close my eyes for a moment. When I open them, I see a familiar pain in Dean’s features. It’s a pain I know only too well, since I’ve seen it on his face before.

The boy’s mother rushes out of the office with her hands full of bags and blankets, a pillow and a stuffed animal. “Michael, I want you to turn on the No Vacancy sign while I’m gone. I’ve got Denise covering room service.”

Michael stands up. “I’m going with you.”

“Not now, Michael,” his mom scolds him.

“But I’ve gotta see Asher!” Michael complains.

“Hey, Michael,” Dean says. “Hey, I know how you feel, but you gotta go easy on your Mom right now, okay?”

Michael’s mom drops her purse in her attempt to unlock her car door. “Damn it!”

“I got it,” I say. I lean over and pick the purse up.

“Thank you,” she says. She loads all of her stuff into the back seat.

“Listen, you’re in no condition to drive,” Dean tells her. “Why don’t you let me give you a lift to the hospital?”

“No, I couldn’t possibly–”

“No, I insist,” Dean says, taking her keys. “It’s no trouble.”

“Thanks,” she says. She turns to Michael. “Be good.”

Dean helps her into the passenger’s seat. He turns to me after shutting the door. “We’re going to kill this thing. I want it dead, you hear me?” he says in a low, livid voice.

I nod and watch him drive away, leaving me alone to stand there awkwardly with Michael. Kids were never my thing, it was always hard to figure out what to do with them. The only young kid I’ve ever really been around was Sam. But Michael’s older, and he’s smart, he’s got a good head on his shoulders. Like Dean and I did. Maybe it won’t be so difficult with him.

“Have you eaten breakfast yet?” I ask Michael. He shakes his head. “Wanna go get something to eat?” Again, he shakes his head no. I sigh and sit down on the bench next to him. “Sitting out here won’t fix anything. You’ve got to keep your mind busy until Asher gets better.”

“What if he never gets better?” Michael asks glumly.

There’s a good chance that Asher won’t get better. Of course, I could never tell Michael this, but I don’t want to give him false hope either. That’s part of the reason why I grew so negative. The less I’m hopeful for, the less I’m disappointed when things don’t go the way I hoped.

“Your brother is in good hands at the hospital,” I tell him. Hopefully Michael doesn’t see through my evasion. “Let’s go get some food, though. I’m starving. You’ve got to be hungry, too.” He sits there quietly, still swinging his feet. I lean over and say in a low voice, “You’ll get to ride in the Impala.”

Michael’s eyes dart over to the shiny, black car. It looks like he wants to go but would rather stay behind and pout. Then, his stomach grumbles. He clutches it and says in defeat, “Okay, let’s go.”

Michael directs me through town to his favorite diner. While we eat, Dean updates me through text. Asher doesn’t look good, apparently. Neither do the other kids. Dean and I need to do something fast or a lot of children are going to die.

After breakfast I drop Michael off at the motel and head to the library. I don’t really know what to look for, but at this point, I’ve got to do something to try to find clues to who our mystery human is.

I sit at an old microfiche machine for a couple of hours, scanning through slide after slide of old newspaper articles, taking notes. Whenever I look up from the small screen, my vision is coned down to the square shape of the view box.

My phone vibrates on the table. I answer it. “Hey, Dean.”

“Hey,” Dean whispers. He must still be at the hospital.

“How’s the kid?”

“He’s not good,” Dean says. “Where you at?”

“I’m at the library,” I say, flipping slowly through more slides as I talk. “I’ve been trying to find out as much as I can about this shtriga.”

“What have you got?”

“Well, bad news,” I say. I hear Dean huff on the other end of the line. “I started with Fort Douglas around the time you said our dads were there. Same deal. Before that there was Ogdenville, before that, North Haverbrook and Brockway. Every fifteen to twenty years it hits a new town.” I lower my voice. “Dean, this thing is just getting started in Fitchburg. In all these other places it goes on for months, getting at dozens of kids, before it finally moves on. The kids languish into comas and then they just die.”

“How far back does this thing actually go?” Dean asks.

“Ah, I don’t know,” I say. I flip to new article with a photograph taking up most of the page. “The earliest mention I could find is this place called Black River Falls, back in the 1890's. Talk about a horror show…” My voice trails off. “Whoa.”

“Harley?”

“Hold on…I’m looking at a photograph right now of a bunch of doctors standing around a kid’s bed.” I look closer, examining the doctors one last time for good measure. “One of the doctors is Heidecker.”

“And?” Dean says.

“And this picture was taken in 1893.”

Dean is quiet for a moment. I hear the faint bustle of the hospital through the phone. After a moment, he says, “You sure?”

“Yeah, yeah absolutely,” I say. “But Dean, don’t–”

Dean hangs up the phone. I stare at it, watching the screen turn black. I sigh, then gather my things. Might as well head back to the room.

Much to my relief, Dean is already at the motel when I get there, doing research on my laptop. I take off my jacket and toss it on the bed.

“So Heidecker, huh?” Dean says.

I slump down in a chair. “Yeah, right? We should have thought of this before. A doctor’s a perfect disguise. You’re trusted, you can control the whole thing.”

Dean flattens his lips together with a grimace. “That son of a bitch.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t draw on him right there.”

“Yeah, well, first of all, I’m not going to open fire in a peds ward.”

I nod approvingly. “Good call.”

“Second, it wouldn’t have done any good. The bastard’s bulletproof unless he’s chowing down on something. And third, I wasn’t packing, which is a good thing ’cause I probably would’ve burned a clip in him on principal alone.”

“You’re getting wise in your old age, Dean,” I say.

“Damn right,” Dean says, pulling how brows down to a serious look. “’Cause now I know how we’re going to get it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Shtriga. Works through siblings, right?”

“Right…” I say slowly, trying to figure where he’s going with this.

“Well last night,” Dean begins, and, finally understanding, I finish with, “It went after Asher.”

“So I’m thinking tonight it’s probably gonna come after Michael,” Dean says.

A light bulb flicks to life in my head. “Well, we’ve gotta get him out of here!”

“No,” Dean says, tapping his lip. “No, that would blow the whole deal.”

“What? You wanna use the kid as bait? Are you nuts?” I stand up and stride over to Dean, towering over him where he sits. “No! Forget it. That’s out of the question.”

Dean gets up and grabs my shoulders, pushing me out of his space. “It’s not out of the question, Harley. It’s the only way. If this thing disappears, it could be years before we get another chance.”

“Michael’s a kid,” I say through my teeth. “I’m not going to dangle him in front of that thing like a worm on a hook.”

“My dad did not send me here to just walk away.”

“Send _you_ here?” I scoff. “He knew I was with you, Dean. He sent _us_ here. Maybe he thought I’d have a level head and think through this case rationally.”

“This isn’t about you,” Dean says angrily. He puts his hands on his waist and walks a few paces away. “I’m the one who screwed up, all right? It’s my fault. There’s no telling how many kids have gotten hurt because of me.”

“What are you saying, Dean? How is it your fault?”

Dean doesn’t respond. I sigh and I cross my arms over my chest. Staying calm is the only way I have a chance of getting him to talk about something that’s bothering him.

“Dean,” I say gently. “You’ve been hiding something from the get-go. How do our dads bail on a hunt? How to they let something get away? It’s not bothering me, but it’s bothering you. Now talk to me, Dean. Tell me what’s going on.”

“Fort Douglas, Wisconsin,” Dean says after a long pause. “It was our third night in this crap room, Sam and I, and I was climbing the walls, I needed to get some air. I waited until Sam was asleep so I could get out, play some arcade games in the reception lobby for a bit.”

He’s quiet for a moment. I stay still, afraid to move a muscle, afraid to breathe. I can’t believe it – Dean is actually _talking_ to me.

“When I got back to the room I saw this strange light coming from Sammy’s room. It was the shtriga, leaning over him. I grabbed the rifle from the table, but it heard me cock the gun and it started hissing. That’s when my dad showed up. Burst through the door, shot at it a couple of times. The thing vanished through the window.” Dean walks over to the dresser and leans back against it. “Dad just grabbed us and booked it. Dropped us off at Pastor Jim’s about three hours away. By the time he got back to Fort Douglas to meet up with your dad, the shtriga had disappeared. It was just gone. Never surfaced again until now. My dad never spoke about it again, I didn’t ask. But he…ah…he looked at me different, you know? Which was worse. Not that I blame him. He gave me an order and I didn’t listen. I almost got Sam killed.”

My gut twists into a painful knot as several thoughts flash through my mind at the same time. The first thought is the unruly comparison between Dean’s story with Sam and my story with Logan. The difference is that when I was warned not to touch the guns and did so anyway, it resulted in killing my brother. Dean was instructed to stay indoors to make sure no one came to hurt him or Sam while their dad was away. He had no way of knowing the creature his dad was hunting would come after Sam.

The second thought is that I’m about to console Dean the same way he consoled me. If those generic solaces pissed me off, I can only imagine how they’d affect hot-headed Dean. But it’s all I can think to say.

“You were just a kid,” I say softly.

“Don’t,” Dean snaps. Here we go. “Don’t. My dad knew this was unfinished business for me, so he sent me here to finish it.”

I sigh. There’s honestly no use trying to convince Dean that it wasn’t his fault, so I might as well give up now. “But using Michael to get your unfinished business taken care of…I don’t know, Dean. I mean, how about one of us hides under the covers, be the bait?”

“No, it won’t work.” Dean walks back over to the table. “It’s gotta get close enough to feed. It’ll see us. Believe me, I don’t like it, but it’s gotta be the kid.”

“All right,” I say in defeat. “Let’s go talk to Michael. I guess it’s a good thing his mom is at the hospital with Asher.”

Michael sits behind the front desk playing a video game when we walk in. He looks up at us when the bell over the door tinkles. His poor little face is still pulled into a somber frown.

“Hey, Michael,” I say. “How you holding up?”

He gives me a reproachful look. I put my hand on the small of Dean’s back and give him a slight push forward. Being a big brother with a history of responsibility to his younger sibling, it would make the most sense for him to ask Michael to help us. He could probably be more sympathetic than me. Not to mention that this is _his_ crazy plan, not mine.

Dean leans his elbows on the countertop. “So, uh, hi,” he begins awkwardly. “Look, there’s no easy way to say this, but we know what happened to your brother.”

Michael’s head shoots up. “You do?”

“Yeah.” Dean glances back at me. I try to keep my face as emotionless as possible. I won’t give him any hint that I accept this. He’s going to completely shatter this boy’s innocence, and that goes against everything I said I would protect after seeing Sam in the snow fifteen years ago.

“Well, what happened?” Michael demands.

“He was…his soul was taken by a creature called a shtriga,” Dean says hesitantly.

I put my face in my palm.

Michael stands up, his face going white. “What? You’re insane.”

“This thing feeds off children’s souls,” Dean continues, trying to be as pacifying as possible but failing astoundingly. There’s no easy way to tell a kid that monsters are real.

“You’re crazy!” Michael shouts. He grabs the cordless phone from its cradle. “Just go away or I’m calling the cops!”

“Hang on a second.” Dean reaches out to Michael. “Just listen to me. You have to believe me, okay? This thing came through the window and it attacked your brother. I’ve seen it. I know what it looks like…because it attacked my brother once, too.”

Michael’s chest heaves as he takes quick, frightened breaths. He slowly hangs up the phone. “This thing…is it…like…it has this long, black robe?”

“You saw it last night, didn’t you?”

“I thought I was having a nightmare,” Michael says quietly.

“I’d give anything not to tell you this, but sometimes nightmares are real,” Dean says.

Michael gives him a funny look. “So why are you telling me?”

Dean looks at me again. This time I avoid his eyes completely.

“Because we need your help,” Dean says, turning back to Michael.

“My help?” he repeats breathlessly.

Dean nods. “We can kill it. Me and her–” He jabs his thumb in my direction “–that’s what we do. But we can’t do it without you.”

The gears in Michael’s head must be turning at full speed from the confused look on his face. He saw what the shtriga did to his brother. He’s heard about the other kids in the hospital. He knows how it works. Finally, he shouts, “What? No!”

“Michael, listen to me,” Dean says intensely. “This thing hurt Asher, and it’s going to keep hurting kids unless we stop it, you understand me?”

Michael just stares at Dean, horrified. After a few moments of silence, he takes off running and disappears through the back room.

“Michael!” Dean calls after him.

“Dean, leave him alone. We tried, that’s all we could do.”

Dean slams his fist on the counter. “Yeah, I know.”

We head back to the room. Dean’s shoulders are slumped slightly in defeat. I can’t say I’m sorry that Michael won’t help us, but now we’re back to square one and the only thing we’ve accomplished is scaring the hell out of a kid.

“Well, that went crappy,” Dean says as he falls back onto the bed.

“What did you expect? You can’t ask an adult to do something like that, much less a kid.”

“Yeah, but I figured he would be a little bit more willing to help his brother.” Dean rubs his hands over his eyes and back through his hair.

I look at Dean incredulously. “Not everyone goes around risking their safety for someone else, especially after learning that evil imaginary creatures are real.”

“Yeah, but this is his brother. His younger brother. He knows he has to take care of him but he won’t.”

“Dean,” I say softly as I sit down on the bed next to him. He keeps his hands over his face and ignores me like a child. “Dean, listen…You were raised a whole lot differently than Michael was. You knew from a very young age that supernatural things existed. Michael just found that out. I’m sure he would do anything for his brother, but you can’t expect a normal kid to suddenly want to cross paths with a monster.”

All I get in response is a low grunt. Dean slowly drags his hands up his face and tucks them under his head, which he tilts slightly to the side when he looks at me. “Usually you’d be kicking my ass for being so selfish. What’s up with you? It’s like you’ve gone all soft-hearted on me.”

I punch him in the stomach. He curls up, clutching his side.

“Nope, you haven’t,” he says in a strained voice.

My sarcastic retort is interrupted by a knock at the door. Dean gets up from the bed and goes to the window, where he pulls back the curtains a fraction of an inch. He throws me a gleeful smile before opening the door, revealing Michael.

“If you kill it, will Asher get better?” Michael asks.

“Honestly?” Dean says. “We don’t know.”

“You said you were a big brother,” Michael says, and Dean nods. “You’d take care of your little brother? You’d do anything for him?”

Dean looks at me, his face full of pride. He turns to Michael and says, “Yeah, I would.”

Michael takes a deep breath and sighs. “Me too. I’ll help.”

“Awesome.” Dean ruffles Michael’s long hair. “We’ve got work to do. The shtriga’s gonna come tonight, and we’re gonna be ready for it.”

Our first task requires us to think of a creative way to see when the shtriga is getting close to Michael without Dean and I being in the room, but to also be close enough so we could get to him in time before the shtriga takes his soul. We can’t hide outside of the window because that’s the shtriga’s entry and exit point, and if we stayed just beyond the bedroom door, the shtriga could still probably smell us.

Michael’s current fad is spy movies, and he’s the one that gives us the idea of using a hidden camera. Unfortunately, Dean and I don’t carry spy equipment in our big trunk of mysteries, so Dean has to go buy one. I stay behind with Michael. We make some slight changes to his room, rearranging a few things so the camera has a perfect, concealed hiding spot with a good view of the bed and window.

I figure the best place for Dean and I to stake out is in the next room over, Michael’s mom’s room. When he gets back from running his errands, Dean sets up the camera on a bookshelf, artfully veiled by a few stuffed animals. I download the camera software to my laptop in the next room. The kit that Dean bought is pretty close to top-of-the-line. Not only does it have the typical live feed, but it has open communication.

The software finishes its upload and flicks to a new screen, which shows Dean’s face as he adjusts the lens. I can see Michael in bed behind him. It’s getting late, and we have to hurry. The sound turns on and Dean’s conversation with Michael picks up through the speakers.

“This camera has night vision on it, so we’ll be able to see clear as day,” Dean tells him. He raises his voice a little and peers into the camera lens. “Are we good?”

“A hair to the right,” I instruct him. Dean shifts the camera. “There, there, that’s good.”

“What do I do?” Michael asks. He’s trying his hardest to be brave, I can see that in his face. But his voice gives him away – he’s clearly frightened.

Dean sits down on the bed. “Just stay under the covers.”

“And if it shows up?” Michael’s eyes are wide as he looks up at Dean.

“We’ll be right in the next room. We’re gonna come in with guns, so as soon as we do, you roll off this bed and crawl under it.”

I’m surprised how soft his voice is, how gentle he sounds. Maybe I was wrong before. Maybe Dean does have a caring side.

In the span of a few seconds, flashes of our time in Ohio, where Dean almost kissed me in front of the bar, and our one drunken mistake in the motel room, fly across my mind. I wonder if I had let things just happen, would it be different between Dean and I now?

I shake my head. Once again I manage to think of the most inappropriate things at the most inapt times.

My mind clears up in time to hear Michael ask, “What if you shoot me?”

“We won’t shoot you,” Dean assures him. “We’re good shots. We’re not going to fire until you’re clear, okay?”

Michael nods his head a little bit.

“Have you heard a gunshot before?” Dean asks.

“Like in the movies?” Michael says, a hint of brightness in his voice.

Dean smiles slightly. “It’s gonna be a lot louder than in the movies. So I want you to stay under the bed, cover your ears, and do _not_ come out until we say so. Understand?” Michael nods again, slowly, the fear in his face increasing. Dean relaxes his shoulders. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

There’s a long moment of silence while Michael contemplates this question, looking away from Dean and then back at him a few times. “No, I’m okay,” Michael says confidently. Then he adds in a small voice, “Just don’t shoot me.”

I laugh quietly. Michael’s concern over getting shot is exactly how I’d expect Dean to handle the situation. Would he be scared about getting his soul sucked out of him by an evil near-immortal witch? No, of course not. He’d be worried about something as trivial as a knife wound or a bullet hole.

Dean rests his hand on Michael’s shoulder. “We’re not going to let anything happen to you. I promise.” He stands up and heads for the door, where he’s out of frame. “I’m going to go wait with Harley. Stay in bed, don’t move until we tell you. Everything will be okay.”

Michael lays back and pulls the blankets up to his chin, his large, anxious eyes shining in the dim light of the moon shimmering through the window. I hear the door creak open and snap shut. A few moments later, Dean enters Michael’s mom’s room. He sighs deeply as he falls into the chair next to me.

“And now we wait,” he says.

I’m not as cautious as I usually try to be when I stare at Dean.

Dean narrows his eyes. “What?”

“Nothing,” I say hastily, shifting my eyes downward. “It was nice of you. To be so kind to Michael, I mean.” _After practically forcing him to be bait in our scheme_ , I add in my head.

He shrugs. “I just started to think that at that age I wouldn’t have been able to force Sam into something like that. Michael didn’t deserve it. I had to at least give him a choice at the last minute.”

Well, that’s as close to compassion I’ll ever see from Dean. I kind of like it. I would never tell him that, though, because I would probably never see the slightest hint of benevolence from him again.

Dean and I take turns watching the security camera feed. When it’s my shift, I keep my eyes glued to the screen. They start to burn from the effort, but I will not lose one second when that shtriga appears just because I decided to take an extra-long blink.

“What time is it?” Dean groans from the bed, where he works on replacing the old bullets in our guns and extra magazines with the new ones.

“Almost three,” I say. “Are you sure these iron rounds are going to work?”

“ _Consecrated_ iron rounds,” Dean corrects me. “And yeah, it’s what my dad said he used last time.”

Dean snaps the clip into the last handgun and pulls back the chamber, allowing a bullet to slide into place. He flips the safety on and tosses it onto the pile of guns on the bed.

“All right, it’s my shift,” he says.

“Wait, look,” I say, peering closer to the screen. Dean comes up behind me.

There’s movement outside of the window, a faint shadow blending in well with the swaying of the trees. A long, spindly-fingered hand reaches out slowly toward the glass. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was a tree branch. But then the window starts to open.

I jump to my feet. “Now!” I say urgently.

“Not yet.” Dean hands me a couple of guns without taking his eyes off the feed.

The large, hooded figure glides effortlessly through the long window and over to Michael’s bed. Michael lays there, frozen in place, eyes clamped shut. My heart starts racing and my palms get sweaty, and this powerful energy to protect Michael suddenly overwhelms me, like a maternal urge to defend their young.

“We have to go now,” I hiss at Dean.

Dean waits one long moment before saying, “Okay, go!”

We’re out the door in seconds. I stow one gun in my waistband and ready the other in my hands. Dean kicks open the door with his foot and we burst in, guns blazing. The shtriga leans over Michael, whose head is bent upward as if suspended from his face. A pale blue light floats between Michael’s mouth and the hooded figure.

“Michael, down!” Dean orders.

The shtriga looks up at us and hisses, breaking the thick trail of blue light, which I realize is Michael’s energy. Once the connection is broken, Michael is able to roll to the side and crawl under the bed. Dean and I release a clip each into the shtriga. It stays upright, jerking back and forth at each impact of the bullets, until the last one hits. Then it crumples in a heap on the floor.

“Mike, you all right?” Dean calls out.

“Yeah,” comes Michael’s muffled voice from under the bed.

“Just sit tight,” Dean orders. He readies his gun with a new clip and takes a few cautious steps toward the motionless lump of dark robes. His tense body relaxes slightly and he glances back at me in mild relief.

Before I can even get my mouth open to warn him, the shtriga is abruptly upright again and clutching Dean’s throat. Dean drops his gun and claws at the bony hand around his neck. The shtriga throws him against the wall as if he were a rag doll. 

Dean is rarely incapacitated by an injury that minor, but he’s not moving. I want to run to him and make sure he’s all right but the shtriga has other plans for me. I toss the wasted gun to the side and raise the one from my waistband the same time the shtriga raises its hand to strike me. The heavy arm collides with my chest and shoves me backwards, the wind escaping my lungs in a painful whoosh as my back hits the floorboards.

I don’t even have time to take a breath before the shtriga pins me down, his wrinkled, foul face with a hole in the center just inches from mine. I twist my head from side to side with my lips pursed, like a baby avoiding food. The shtriga grabs my jaw with one clammy hand and pries it open. The same blue light that was emitted from Michael slowly floats upward from me and into the dark hole under the hood of the shtriga. I struggle against it, reaching for my gun, which has to be around somewhere, but I get fainter by the second. The longer the shtriga stays over me, the more intense the blue light gets and the weaker I become.

My vision grows darker, fuzzier. I feel myself slipping into nothingness. Even though my hearing is slowly diminishing, two gunshots ring distinctively in my ears. The heavy weight on my body disappears immediately afterward. My lungs open up and I suck in a huge, raspy breath of air. As I breathe in, the blue light returns into my body.

I stay on the floor, gasping for air. Dean appears and kicks the pile of robes by my side. At the nudge of his boot, the energy that the shtriga stole from the children escapes in long twisting strands of blue light and flies through the open window. Dean raises his gun and shoots the shtriga three more times, for good measure. When the last of the energy disappears, the shtriga disintegrates.

Dean looks down at me. “You okay?” he asks, extending his arm.

I nod and take his hand, and he pulls me up. I sway a bit, slightly dizzy from having my soul partially sucked out of my body. Dean places a hand around my waist to steady me. I dare to look up at him. The closeness of his bright green eyes and soft lips greet me. He hasn’t shaved in a few days. The lengthening stubble just adds to the attractiveness of his mouth, his face. For how breathless I am at the moment I’d think the shtriga was still trying to suck out my soul.

Michael peeks his head out from under the bed. From what I can see in the dim light, his face is chalk white.

“Can I come out now?” he asks in a whisper.

Dean and I step away from each other immediately. My heart is racing and it’s definitely not because of the battle with the shtriga.

“Yeah, Michael, you can come on out,” Dean says with a small laugh. He walks over to Michael and helps him to his feet. Dean smiles proudly, resting a comforting hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“Did you do it?” Michael asks. “Is it gone?”

“Yeah, it’s gone,” Dean says. “And we couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Asher’s gonna be okay now?”

“Yeah, he is,” Dean says quietly.

Michael wraps his thin arms around Dean’s waist. Dean looks back at me, startled. I smile encouragingly. Dean strokes Michael’s long hair a couple of times.

The boys’ room is a mess. Dean sends Michael off to his mother’s room for bed while we hang back to clean up. I take the shtriga’s robes outside and burn them in a metal trash can. It seems like the only logical thing to do.

Dean finds me staring at the burning flames. My eyes glaze over with a piercing white light when he shakes my shoulder. “You good?”

“Yeah.” I pour dirt in the trash can to smother the fire.

The next morning dawns with a clear blue sky, almost mirroring the mood of the town that must be rejoicing over the seven suddenly healed kids. Dean and I are loading our packed bags into the Impala when Michael’s mom pulls up next to us and parks the car. Michael comes running out of the hotel lobby.

“Joanna, hi,” Dean greets her. “How’s Asher doing?”

“He’s doing great,” she says breathlessly

“Mom! How’s Ash?” Michael asks eagerly.

“Got some good news. You’re brother’s going to be fine. No one can explain it, it’s a miracle.” Michael peeks around his mother and smiles mischievously at us. I grin back. “They’re going to keep him overnight for observation and then he’s coming home.”

“That’s great,” Dean says.

“How are all the other kids doing?” I ask.

“Good, real good,” Joanna says. “A bunch of them should be checking out in a few days. Doctor Travis says the ward’s going to be like a ghost town soon.”

“Doctor Travis?” I ask, faking a puzzled expression. “What about Doctor Heidecker?”

“Oh, he wasn’t in today. Must have been sick or something.”

Dean raises his eyebrows at me. “Yeah, must have.”

Joanna looks down at Michael. “So, did anything happen while I was gone?”

Michael glances at Dean and I, then shrugs. “Nah, same old stuff,” he says nonchalantly.

“Okay. Let’s go see Ash,” Joanna says. Michael dashes off towards their car. “I’d better get going before he hot-wires the car and drives himself.” She waves goodbye.

Dean and I watch their car disappear, leaving us standing alone in an empty parking lot.

“It’s too bad,” I say.

“Oh, they’ll be fine,” Dean says.

“I meant Michael. He’ll always know there are things out there in the dark. He’ll never be the same, you know?”

Dean nods solemnly. “But at least his brother’s safe.”

We stare at each other for a few moments. It’s not an emotional or even sexual look. It’s more like…we’re tired. We see each other’s pain, the pain of the job, and we know there’s no way out. We’ve been hunters for too long – it’s part of who we are. But there are some days where you just want to run away from it all and hide. So as we stand there in front of the Impala, a few feet away from each other, we communicate silently: I know you’re suffering, and I wish I could make it all disappear.


	5. Dead in the Water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John joins Harley and Dean on a case. This is the chapter that starts slowly pulling away from the script to include my own creation. But it's still basically copyright infringement lol.

It’s a week until Halloween. Everywhere we go different levels of the holiday spirit bloom. Some towns reflect true community, with houses simply decorated with jack-o-lanterns and skeletons or looking like they were pulled from a classic zombie movie. And then there were the dark cities we passed through that didn’t have a single Halloween decoration in sight, but were somehow still scarier than the nights we had to go hunt a monster. I would think that the closer it gets to Halloween, the more cases there would be, considering the unhealthy obsession teenagers and even a few adults have to dabble in the occult around this time of year. But it’s been relatively quiet. No strange occurrences, no mass killings or insane weather changes. Just a big heap of nothing.

All month I had been trying to steer Dean and I out of the Midwest. I love the wilderness and the back roads, but the farthest out of a 2,000 mile radius of Wisconsin we’ve been since September is Colorado. It sounds so cliché, but I want to see San Francisco, New Orleans, New York, the beaches of southern California. Sad to say it seems that ghosts and demons and evil creatures only care to lurk in central America. The only way I’ll get to visit any of those places is if I go by myself.

Or I could lie.

We’re about 650 miles north of Louisiana. I could tell Dean there’s some bad hoodoo black magic going on down there that we should look into, say that people are dying. If he’s not into it I could at least try to get his mouth watering for gumbo.

I had Dean at “hoodoo”. It didn’t take long for us to change course, and now we’re on a straight path to New Orleans. The sky pours out buckets of fat raindrops that flood the highway, weigh down the leaves on the dark trees, and beat down on the Impala, practically drowning out the Stevie Nicks song playing on the radio. I lean my head against the window, humming the chorus to _Wild Heart,_ and watch the deep purple clouds roll across the sky ahead. The melancholy tune is perfect for the weather, the atmosphere.

The Stevie Nicks cassette finishes and pops out of the cassette player. I return it to its case and quickly stuff in a Fleetwood Mac cassette before Dean has a chance to choose something. He shoots me a dirty look.

“I can’t believe you found all of those,” he grumbles.

“Yeah, I know,” I say happily. “I really hit the Stevie Nicks jackpot at that thrift store. Most of these songs I haven’t heard since I was a kid.”

Dean grunts. “We were supposed to be looking for supernatural-related stuff.”

“Stevie Nicks is rumored to be a white witch, you know.”

“No she isn’t,” Dean says cryptically, and he stares me down until I break.

“Okay, she isn’t, but how could I pass up these beauties?” I hold up the cassettes like a priest elevating the Host.

“Just make sure you get some Sabbath or something in there, too.”

“Sure thing, boss,” I say.

“Hey, don’t give me any sass, sweetheart,” Dean says edgily. “You’re lucky I’m even letting you touch the radio.”

I roll my eyes, hating when he’s right. “Yeah, okay. Thanks.”

We drive farther south still, inching our way closer to Louisiana. The excitement bubbles inside me like a happy pot of boiling water, and I’m comfortable here in the car with Dean and my music, watching Indiana fly by. It can’t fly by fast enough, though. It seems endless. The incessant rain blends everything into a soggy darkness and tests my patience for the first time in my life.

Dean stays behind the wheel for practically the entire day since we never made any real plans for a pit stop. He does well at hiding his fatigue but it becomes pretty clear that he’s tired when he nearly misses a phone call in which the phone was ringing a few inches away from him. He manages to catch it on the last ring after I nudge him.

“Hello?” he says into the phone. I hear a deep, muffled voice on the other end of the line. I figure it could be anybody, but when Dean looks over at me and raises his eyebrows, I kind of know who it is. “Hey, Dad.” He listens for a moment. “Yeah, we’ll meet you. See you soon.” He hangs up the phone.

I furrow my eyebrows. “What do you mean ‘We’ll meet you’?”

Dean cranks the wheel and makes a U-turn in the middle of the empty two-lane highway. The back wheels skid slightly, sliding along the rain-soaked blacktop.

“Dean!” I shout. “What are you doing?”

“Dad called,” Dean says nonchalantly, as if that weren’t blatantly obvious. “He found a case for us.”

“Where?” I ask through gritted teeth. I try my hardest to rein in my anger because for some reason Dean actually sounds a bit happy and I’m not about to kill the small ray of joy he’s receiving from his dad.

“Lake Manitoc…” Dean’s voice trails off. I fold my arms over my chest and huff loudly. “It’s in Wisconsin, all right?” he finally says.

“Dean!”

He sighs. “Look, I know you wanted to get out of–”

“What about New Orleans?” I complain, ignoring him. I put my face in my hands.

Dean continues to talk. “But my dad will be working the case with us, and that might–”

“We might as well buy a house in friggin’ Wisconsin,” I mutter, cutting him off again.

“Harley,” Dean snaps.

“Fine,” I say grumpily.

I stay with my arms folded over my chest, slumped down in the seat, and refuse to talk to Dean as we drive north, back to Wisconsin, back to the place where I can’t seem to find an escape.

As Dean had requested, I traded out my Fleetwood Mac cassettes with some of his during our trip. Motorhead plays on the radio now, turned up loud so we don’t have to speak. Dean reaches over and takes the cassette out and replaces it with a random one from my pile. I glare at him from the corner of my eye.

“That won’t make it better,” I grumble.

“Yeah, well, now you can pout and listen to Stevie at the same time,” Dean says. He grins and shoves my arm playfully. “Come on, Lee. You’ll get to see your car again. I know you miss it.”

“Him,” I correct. “And yeah, I do.” I twist around in my seat and tuck one leg underneath me. “Okay, look. I know I’ve expressed my extreme dislike for Wisconsin on multiple occasions, but something I didn’t get a chance to tell you before was that I’ve never seen the Great Lakes. And I want to. Maybe we can go now, when the case is done.”

Dean gives me a funny look. “Great Lakes, huh? First you want to see New Orleans, now this? I’m thinking I should call you a traveler now instead of a hunter.”

“I didn’t want to _see_ New Orleans,” I scoff. “There was a case.”

“I saw your internet history, Harley. You were looking up gumbo and beignets, not hoodoo and murders.”

I fold my arms across my chest again and sulk. “Whatever.”

The rest of the car ride is spent in silence. Dean changes the music because I’ve given up caring. He’d rather spend some quality time with Ozzy. I’m happy Dean will get to see his dad again but it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. If he had called just a few hours later, when we were already in Louisiana, maybe I could have convinced Dean to stick around for the day before heading back. Selfish me.

John calls again when we’re closer to Wisconsin and tells us to go to the Lynwood Inn and get two rooms, and he’ll meet us in the restaurant later on. I don’t voice my skepticism to Dean that if John isn’t there when we arrive, there’s a slight chance he’ll show up at all.

Lake Manitoc is a quiet town that I can describe simply as green. Everything here is so full of dense greenery, even the gas station we stop at is green. But there’s an eerie darkness looming over everything. Sort of feels like it would be my kind of place to live, though.

I go find us a table at the Lynwood Café while Dean gets the rooms. Much to my surprise, John is already there, seated at a booth in the corner.

“Hi, Harley.” John stands up to give me a hug. He lingers a bit longer than normal. I take the time to wrap my arms tightly around him, because I honestly can’t remember the last time I hugged my dad. Much to my relief, he doesn’t ask about him. “How was the drive over?”

“Long,” I say simply. John’s acting unusually cheery.

The waitress brings me a water and a menu. I casually flip through it. “So do you have a lead or something? What’s going on in Lake Manitoc?” I ask.

John pulls out a crumpled newspaper clipping from his jacket pocket and smooths it out on the table before sliding it over. It’s a section of the obituaries, and one in particular is circled.

“Sophie Carlton?” I say, glancing quickly over the article.

“Yep. Drowned in the lake,” John says..

“And?”

“And there’s no body anywhere to be found.”

“Dad!”

John looks up and I turn around in my seat. Dean trots up to the table, barely able to contain his excitement.

“Hey, son,” John says, clapping Dean on the back when he takes a seat next to him.

“What’s going on? What’s this?” Dean takes the obituary from me and reads it. “A drowning? You brought us back here for a drowning?”

“Apparently there’s no body,” I say, taking a sip of my water.

The blond bimbo waitress, who now introduces herself as Wendy, decides to provide better service now that someone as good looking as Dean is ready to be served. I shake my head and become extremely interested in my glass of water. After Wendy leaves with our orders – and Dean’s eyes following her – John continues to brief us on his possible case.

“So listen up, kids. Last week Sophie Carlton, eighteen, walks into the lake, doesn’t walk out. Authorities dragged the water. Nothing. Sophie Carlton is the third Lake Manitoc drowning this year. None of the other bodies were found, either.” John takes a swig of soda. “They had a funeral two days ago.”

“A funeral?” Dean repeats.

“Yeah,” John says. “For closure, I suppose.”

“Closure?” I say, baffled. “What closure? There’s no sense of finality to an empty coffin.”

“She disappeared in the middle of a lake,” Dean says. “Maybe the fish just got hungry.” He looks up and sits back with a breathtaking grin as Wendy returns with our food. She plops my plate down rather ungracefully, focusing all of her attention on John and Dean. I’m glad I just got a salad because I’m so nauseated from the sight of them I don’t think I could hold down something heavier.

I spear an olive with my fork and hold it in front of my mouth. _Focus on the olive,_ I think to myself. Try to tune out the ungodly flirting between Dean and the waitress.

John catches my eye. His eyes travel from me to Dean to the waitress, then back to me. My face flushes. I stuff the olive in my mouth and look out of the window while I chew. John’s not stupid, and I’m being really obvious right now.

Lunch doesn’t pass fast enough. John and Dean catch up, I stay silent for the most part and devote a large portion of brain power in the simple task of eating salad. Dean finally gets to tell his dad about hunting on his own, and to my surprise, he praises me quite a few times. I muster up a smile each time he mentions me, just to hold up my end. Much more to my surprise is how John actually seems proud of Dean.

John gets up to go to the bathroom. Wendy, possibly seeing an opportunity to talk to Dean with one less person at the table, makes a beeline for him.

“Can I get you anything else?” she asks in a fake, airy voice.

Dean smiles at her. It fades as I take the quick opportunity to say, “Just the check, please.”

Wendy looks at Dean, as if she doesn’t entirely believe that I can make a decision for the two of us. He just nods.

“Okay.” She walks away.

Dean hangs his head. “You know, Harley, I’m allowed to have fun once in a while.” He leans over and stares in the direction Wendy went. “That’s fun.”

“We’re on a case, Dean,” I say.

“All work and no play makes Dean a dull boy.”

I scowl at him.

John returns and covers the bill. We manage to escape the café without running into Wendy, thank god. The cool air from outside chills my face and gently lifts a few strands of my hair. I close my eyes, enjoying the brief moment, and when I open them again my heart skips a beat. Sitting in the parking lot along the side of the café, looking as glorious as the day I left him, is my Camaro. I run over to my car and hug the hood.

“Ah, I’ve missed you,” I say lovingly.

“She never welcomes me home like that,” Dean jokes.

John chuckles. “All right, first order of business is checking out the lake and talking to the family.”

“I’ll drive,” I say hastily. John tosses me the keys and we pile into my Camaro.

The Carlton house is about twenty minutes away from the café. It’s not nearly as long of a drive as I’d have liked to have during my reunion with my baby, but I have the windows down, some classic rock playing, a few windy roads to maneuver through, so I’m content.

I pull up the dirt drive and stop in front of a modern cabin painted forest green with a starkly red roof. The clouds have grown darker, threatening rain, and the lack of sunlight makes the tall trees around the property cast long shadows on the ground. The three of us get out and walk to the front door. Dean knocks. A young guy with a round face opens the door.

“Will Carlton?” John asks.

“Yeah,” the guys says apprehensively.

“I’m Agent Ford. This is Agent Hamill and Agent Fischer. We’re with the U.S. Wildlife Service.” John flashes an ID in a fancy leather cover.

I lean over and whisper to Dean, “ _Star Wars_ , huh?” He sniggers.

“Can we ask you a few questions about Sophie Carlton?”

Will nods and steps outside. “We already talked to the local police. I’m not sure what more you can do for us.” He gestures around the house, where the lake is, and leads us there.

“We’re just following up with the case,” Dean says.

“Was Sophie your sister?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Will says quietly.

We turn the corner around the cabin and I hold back a gasp. The entire view before us is incredibly spooky. Tall pine trees thickly surround a large lake, giving the impression we’re at the bottom of a basin. The dark, full clouds above are packed so low it looks like they’re touching the tops of the trees, providing the lake with a closed-off feeling. But that’s not the scariest part. From a distance, the water in the lake is so dark it looks black. It’s barely moving, just a large slab of obsidian in an emerald ring.

“She was about a hundred yards out,” Will says. “That’s where she got dragged down.”

“And you’re sure she didn’t just drown?” Dean asks.

“Yeah. She was a varsity swimmer. She practically grew up in that lake. She was as safe out there as she was in her own bathtub.”

“So no splashing? No signs of distress?” I ask.

Will shakes his head. “No, that’s what I’m telling you.”

John surveys the lake. “Did you see any shadows in the water? Maybe some dark shape breach the surface?”

“No. Again, she was really far out there.”

“You ever see any strange tracks by the shoreline?” John prompts him. At this suggestion, Dean walks forward through the gravely sand to look for any markings.

“No, never,” Will says slowly. He narrows his eyes. “Why, what do you think’s out there?”

“We’ll let you know as soon as we do,” John says. He pats Will’s shoulder and turns to head back toward the car. Dean follows.

I stay put and look out at the docks. An old man sits out there on a chair, staring at the lake. That must be Will and Sophie’s dad.

“What about your father?” I ask.

Will looks over at his dad. “Look, if you don’t mind…I mean…He didn’t see anything and he’s kind of been through a lot.”

I nod. “We understand.” I follow John and Dean to my car and drive back to town.

“Well, that was a bust,” Dean says. “Are we really looking for something supernatural here? Maybe she did just drown.”

“Let’s see what we find at the police station,” John says.

“I can do some research, too,” I say. “John, you said other people drowned here. I can try to see if there are any connections.”

“We’ll split up then,” John says. “Dean and I will go to the police station, Harley, if you want to get started on that.”

I take John and Dean to the Lynwood Inn so they can get the Impala and head to the station. I’m glad to be alone. Give Dean and his dad some time to themselves. Give me a chance to breathe. When John’s around Dean won’t act the way he would before. He won’t watch what he says or does. It’s like being with a different Dean, one that I’m not too fond of. This will let me clear my mind and just do work.

It isn’t that hard to dig up the past on a town this small, and I’ve done as much as I can within an hour, so I take a nap.

I get woken up in the worst way. John and Dean burst through the door of the inn, laughing loudly. I jerk awake and point my gun at the doorway, but they don’t even notice.

Dean stops laughing and says, “But seriously, dad, I’m not out of practice.”

“You really are if she could burn you that bad,” John says, wiping an imaginary tear from his eye.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

John drapes his arm around Dean’s broad shoulders and gives them a hearty squeeze. “Smooth Dean here tried to hit on the sheriff’s daughter and she totally called him out.”

My stomach churns in a painful knot. “Oh, is that all?” I clip the safety back in place and take an unusually long time storing the gun away in my bag.

“It wasn’t that big a deal,” Dean grumbles. “Girls like that just play hard to get.”

“Dean tried to act like he couldn’t find the motel she was directing him to, two blocks away,” John continues, as if I asked to hear more. “And after walking us there she says, ‘Must be hard, with your sense of direction, never being able to find your way to a decent pickup line’.” He bursts into another fit of laughter.

“Ha-ha,” Dean jeers. He stalks over to his duffel bag and starts to pick through the clothes inside.

“So did you actually talk to the sheriff and get some information or did you just follow a girl around all afternoon?” I ask, carelessly forgetting to mask the biting tone in my voice.

“Whoa, hey now,” Dean says. “No need to get jealous.” He pushes my arm playfully. It takes most of my energy not to knock him the hell out. “Yeah, we talked to the sheriff. He said there’s no indigenous carnivores in the lake, unless it’s the Loch Ness Monster.”

“We might want to look into the dam,” John says. “That might be our trigger. It’s badly damaged and they’re going to open the spillway. Sheriff Jake says in another six months there won’t be much of a lake left.”

“I think you’re right,” I tell John, both consciously and unconsciously ignoring Dean. “The lake was a constant factor in my research. All these drownings and the lake seems to be the only place worth drowning in. Check this out.” I take a seat at the table and open my laptop. An article from The Lake Manitoc Tribune is still open, showing the death of a 12-year-old girl. “There’s been three drowning victims this year, and six more spread out over the past thirty-five years. Those bodies were never recovered either. If there is something out there, it’s picking up its pace.”

Dean picks a shirt out of the bag, sniffs it, and tosses it on the bed. “So, what, we got a lake monster on a binge?”

“I don’t know. The whole lake monster theory…it just bugs me,” I say.

“Why?” Dean asks.

“Well, Loch Ness, um, Lake Champlain, there are literally hundreds of eyewitness accounts. But here, almost nothing.”

“Almost?” John repeats. He comes to stand behind me and reads over my shoulder.

“Whatever is out there, no one’s living to talk about it,” I say. I scroll through the article and click back to the Tribune’s homepage.

“Wait, Barr,” John says, pointing to a name that disappeared after I clicked to the homepage. “Christopher Barr. Where have I heard that name before?”

I return to the previous page and read from the article. “Christopher Barr was the victim in July. Look, here’s a picture.”

A frightened young boy with shaggy red hair stands next to a police officer in the picture. I look up at John. He stares at the screen solemnly.

“Oh,” he says softly.

“What?” Dean and I say together.

“Christopher Barr was Andrea’s husband. Lucas’s father,” John says.

“Who?” I scroll through the article, looking for some mention of who Andrea and Lucas are, and how John might know them.

“We met Andrea and Lucas at the sheriff’s station,” Dean says.

“She was your impromptu tour guide?” I mutter while I skim the page. “It says here Christopher Barr took his son Lucas out swimming. Apparently Lucas was on a floating wooden platform when Chris downed. Two hours passed before the kid got rescued.” I look over at John and Dean. “Maybe we have an eyewitness after all.”

“No wonder the kid was so freaked out,” Dean says to John. “Watching one of your parents die isn’t something you just get over.”

John opens his mouth, sighs, then shakes his head. “I left something in the car.” He slams the door shut behind him. In a few moments the roar of the Impala’s engine shakes the cheap panes of the window. Dean looks at me quizzically.

“Well, that statement had a triple meaning,” I say.

“Oh,” Dean says, hanging his head when he finally understands. “Lucas, me, and you.”

“Yeah,” I say. I close my laptop. “So what’s our next move?”

“Talk to the kid.”

Since John disappeared with the Impala, Dean and I take my Camaro to the park around three-thirty. Dean said he overheard Andrea telling Lucas she would take him to the park after she picked him up from the sheriff’s station at three, where her grandfather, Sheriff Jake, was babysitting him.

I recognize the boy from the picture, Lucas, coloring in the middle of the grass a ways away, surrounded by paper and crayons and what looks like plastic green army men. Dean and I approach an extremely thin, frail woman sitting alone on a bench.

“Hi, can we join you?” I ask her.

Andrea turns around. She looks mildly shocked to see Dean, and rather curious that I’m there too. “I’m here with my son,” she says, and turns her attention back to Lucas.

“Oh. Mind if I say hi?” Dean asks cheerfully. Without waiting for an answer, he wanders off to talk to Lucas.

“I’m Harley,” I say, taking a seat next to Andrea.

“Tell your friend this whole _Jerry Maguire_ thing is not gonna work on me,” she says.

I clear my throat and purse my lips. “I don’t think that’s what this is about.”

“Lucas hasn’t said a word, not even to me,” Andrea says, almost inaudibly. “Not since his dad’s accident.”

When I look at her this time, I don’t feel anger or jealousy or any of those things I was feeling when we first walked up to her, knowing that this is the woman Dean is currently temporarily attracted to. I don’t know why. Bony arms. Collarbones jutting out beneath her red sweater. Wispy, dead brown hair. Now, I look at her and I feel sorry for her. I can’t imagine what she must be going through. Losing her husband must have been hard enough, but her kid is like a walking zombie. That’s got to be just like losing him, too.

“Yeah, I heard,” I say softly. “I’m sorry.”

Andrea nods once.

“What are the doctors saying?”

“That it’s a kind of post-traumatic stress.” She shakes her head, as if she knows that answer is bull but it’s the only thing they can think of.

I watch Dean pick up a couple of the army men and reenact the world’s shortest battle. Lucas doesn’t seem to be interested. Instead, Dean helps himself to a piece of paper and a crayon.

“That can’t be easy. For either of you.” I tug at my shirt collar. At first I was just being empathetic. Now I’ve run out of things to say to be comforting. Dean stands up and heads back to us. Good.

“We moved in with my dad,” Andrea says. “He helps out a lot. It’s just…when I think about what Lucas went through, what he saw…” 

My stomach lurches. I know what it’s like to watch someone die, but it’s possible to recover from it. I’m proof of that. “Kids are strong. You’d be surprised what they can deal with.”

“You know, he used to have such life. He was hard to keep up with, to tell you the truth. Now he just sits there. Drawing those pictures, playing with those army men. I just wish–”

I don’t know what she wishes, because she stops when Lucas approaches Dean with a picture in his hands. She stares at her son, almost as if she’s seeing him for the first time. Lucas hands Dean the picture.

“Thanks,” Dean says. After he takes a look, he says with conviction, “Thanks, Lucas.”

“Hey, sweetie,” Andrea says cautiously.

Lucas lowers his head and scuttles back to his spot in the grass.

“Things will get better,” I tell Andrea, although I’ve got no idea if things really will.

In the car, Dean hands me the picture that Lucas gave him. It’s a decent drawing for a kid. A simplified house, but unmistakable. Green walls, nice porch, red roof…

“Why would Lucas give you a drawing of the Carlton house?” I give him back the picture and start the car.

“Beats me.”

“Did Lucas even know the Carlton’s?”

“It’s a small town, I’m sure they’ve met on occasion.” Dean yawns loudly. “Man, I’m tired.”

“I bet. Take a nap when we get back to the motel.”

He just nods and rests his head against the window. I smile, but it fades quickly. For a moment it started to feel like earlier this morning, before John called. I would be letting myself fall into a false sense of security if I let my guard down now, though.

John is already back when we get to our room. Dean makes a beeline for one of the beds and falls heavily into it. I sit down at the table with John to show him the drawing and recap the events of our trip to the park.

“Well, I think it’s safe to say we can rule out Nessie,” John says. He slides the picture back across the table.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I just drove past the Carlton house on my way back here. There was an ambulance there. Will Carlton is dead.”

I gasp.

“He drowned?” Dean grumbles with his face in a pillow.

“Yep,” John says. “In the sink.”

“What the hell?” I scratch my head. “So you’re right, this isn’t a creature. We’re dealing with something else.”

“Yeah, but what?” Dean asks, still muffled.

“I don’t know,” John says darkly. “Water wraith, maybe? Some kind of demon? I mean, something that controls water. Water that comes from the same source.”

My eyes widen. “The lake.”

“Yeah,” John says.

I stand up and start pacing, quickly piecing together some of the parts to this puzzle. “That would explain why it’s upping the body count. The lake is draining. It’ll be dry in a few months. Whatever this thing is, whatever it wants, it’s running out of time.”

“And if it can get through the pipes, it can get to anyone, almost anywhere.”

Dean rolls over onto his side. “This is gonna happen again soon.”

“And we do know one other thing for sure,” John says. He pauses, giving Dean and I a chance to see if we’ve figured it out as well, but we just look at each other blankly. “We know this has got something to do with Bill Carlton. It took both of his kids. And I asked around today. Lucas’s dad, Chris, is Bill Carlton’s godson.”

“Let’s go pay Mr. Carlton a visit,” Dean says, sitting up in the bed.

“I think you should get some sleep,” I say, pushing him back down. “John and I can go talk to him. You haven’t slept in almost forty-eight hours.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Dean says with a huge yawn, but he doesn’t protest and begins to snore as soon as his head hits the pillow.

John nods to me. “Let’s go. I’ll drive.”

“Actually, can I? It’s been a while, you know…”

It seemed like a good idea at first, letting Dean sleep while John and I follow a lead, until John turns down the music in the car and looks at me with a funny half-grin on his face.

“What?” I say defensively.

“Does Dean know it bothers you when he flirts with other women?” John asks.

My face gets hot and tingly. I grip the steering wheel so tight the car jerks to the right and I have to quickly straighten out before I hit a tree.

“It doesn’t bother me,” I say unconvincingly.

“Sure, it doesn’t.” John taps his knee and looks out of the windshield.

“I’m serious, John. Dean’s a big boy. He can do what he wants.”

John chuckles. “I know he can. That doesn’t mean what he does doesn’t bother you.” Out of the corner of my eye I notice John look back at me, but I just keep my eyes on the road. “You haven’t changed a bit, Harley.”

“Thanks?” I say. An AC/DC song starts on the radio and I say it’s my favorite song to use as an excuse to turn the radio up and stop this conversation.

The clouds haven’t faltered their thick, dark line of defense in the sky. It’s almost dark – or darker – when we reach the Carlton house. There isn’t a response at the door, but we know Bill is home because his old pickup truck is in the driveway. John and I make our way around the house and see Bill’s figure sitting on a bench at the dock, in the same position he was in the last time we were here.

“Mr. Carlton?” I say when we’ve approached him.

Bill’s head jerks up suddenly. He looks around, as if he’s not quite sure how he got there.

“We’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind,” John says.

“We’re from the, the Department–” I begin.

“I don’t care who you’re with,” Bill snaps at me. “I’ve answered enough questions today.”

John ignores him and presses on. “Your son said he saw something in that lake. What about you? You ever see anything out there?” Bill keeps staring out at the water. “Mr. Carlton, Sophie’s drowning and Will’s death, we think there might be a connection to you or your family.”

Bill’s eyes stay fixed on the black, gentle waves of the threatening-looking lake. “My children are gone. It’s…it’s worse than dying. Go away. Please.”

John and I exchange glances and I shrug. Without another word, John and I head back to the car.

“What do you think?” I say, leaning against the hood of the Camaro.

“I think the poor man’s been through hell,” John says gruffly. “I also think he’s not telling us something.”

“Huh.” I look up at the house. The faded green paint on the log walls. The dark red shingle roof. The wood porch that subtly leans to one side.

“What are you thinking?” John asks.

“Maybe Bill’s not the only one who knows something.” I pull out Lucas’s drawing from my pocket and unfold it. For a child, Lucas’s picture has uncanny detail and resemblance to the real house. “I think Dean’s the only one that can get Lucas to talk. Or give him information in some way, at least. He’s got a bit of a rapport going on with the kid already.”

John nods. “It’s getting late. You and Dean go over to the Barr’s house in the morning, see what you can get out of Lucas.”

“All right,” I say.

It’s a restless night for me. I lay on my back in my small bed, staring at the dark ceiling, listening to Dean snore. John took the other room even though I offered to stay by myself. I think he likes the solidarity. I also think he’s got a lot of secrets.

I roll on to my side and hug one of the pillows. John’s comment in the car earlier was so bold, I can’t believe he actually just came out and said that. It’s not like John’s a stranger to me, though. I’ve known him since I was a little kid. It’s also not like he was wrong. I lay here now, watching Dean sleep, and know that John was one-hundred-percent right. I wish it was me that Dean wanted instead of those other pathetic women. But it can’t be. And it won’t.

So now that I’ve stopped wallowing in my petty thoughts, as long as I’m not getting any sleep maybe I can spend the last few hours of my night thinking about the case and try to figure out what the hell could be in that lake and why it went after Bill’s kids and Christopher Barr. And is there even a connection to the earlier victims? We’re just focusing on the most recent deaths. We haven’t even bothered to look back farther.

I don’t get the chance to answer any of my questions because the next thing I know Dean is shaking my shoulder, telling me to get up, on his way to the bathroom. I check the clock on the nightstand between our beds. It’s almost noon.

“Well, we slept a while,” I yell to Dean, who just started the shower. He doesn’t respond, so I go and knock on the door.

“Enter,” he commands.

“I don’t want to come in, loser. Just letting you know we’ve got to go to Andrea and Lucas’s house so you can try to talk to the kid. Get some info.”

“All right, cool,” Dean says, and he proceeds to sing Metallica’s _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ with gusto.

After my shower we make the drive over to Sheriff Jake’s house, where Andrea is currently living with Lucas. The road we take leads us turn-for-turn like we’re going to the Carlton house, except we go one house further. Neighbors. Isn’t that helpful.

Andrea doesn’t look too thrilled to see us. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s a good idea,” she says, after I explain what we’re doing here.

“I just need to talk to him,” Dean pleads. “Just for a few minutes.”

I stand back and let Dean work his magic. He basically just has to stand there, look at Andrea with soft, pleading eyes, maybe pull down the corners of his mouth into a faint, sad smile. He could get away with murder with that look.

“He won’t say anything. What good is it going to do?” Andrea says, but she still stands back in the doorway to let us through.

“Andrea, we think more people might get hurt,” I explain, somewhat frustrated with the vagueness we’re forced to resort to. “We think something’s happening out there.”

Andrea looks confused. “My husband, the others, they just drowned. That’s all.”

“If that’s what you really believe, then we’ll go. But if you think there’s even a possibility that something else could be going on here, please, let me talk to your son,” Dean says, intensifying his smoldering, pleading look.

After a moment of deliberation, Andrea sighs and leads us up to the second floor, to Lucas’s open bedroom. Lucas is on the floor, coloring, crayons and army men strewn about just like at the park. Dean walks in and crouches down by Lucas while Andrea and I hang back in the hallway.

“Hey, Lucas,” Dean says. “You remember me?”

Lucas continues to color. He makes no indication that he’s even noticed Dean is right next to him. Dean looks back at me and I nod encouragingly.

“You know, I, uh, I wanted to thank you for that last drawing. But the thing is, I need your help again.” Dean takes the drawing and unfolds it in front of the kid. “How did you know to draw this? Did you know something bad was gonna happen?” Lucas continues to color and ignore him. “Maybe you could nod yes or no for me.”

Dean wants to be patient for Lucas’s sake, but we’re running out of options for information. He shifts his weight to his other side and leans in closer to Lucas.

“You’re scared. It’s okay, I understand,” Dean says softly. I take a step closer to the doorway so I can hear him better. “See, when I was your age I saw something real bad happen to my mom, and I was scared, too. I didn’t feel like talking, just like you. But see, my mom…I know she wanted me to be brave. I think about that every day. And I do my best to be brave. And maybe…maybe your dad wants you to be brave too.”

Dean rarely talks about his mom. The most I heard about her when we were kids was whatever Dean said when he talked about her in his sleep. When I hear him say things like that I want to comfort him and be able to take away the pain I know he hides.

Something he said, though, must have gotten through to Lucas because he drops his crayon and looks up. Wordlessly, he hands Dean another picture from his collection, then resumes his coloring.

“Thanks, Lucas,” Dean says quietly.

I park my car a block away from Andrea’s house so Dean can call his dad to update him. I hold the picture against the steering wheel and study it. This time, Lucas drew a boy in a blue baseball cap standing with a red bicycle in front of a wood fence surrounding a yellow house. Off to the side is an old, white church.

Last time, Lucas gave Dean a picture of the Carlton house, and Will Carlton died. If Lucas can somehow see who the next victims are going to be, could this little boy in the blue cap be the next target?

I shake my head. There’s something different here. There’s so much more detail, more information. Last time Lucas just showed Dean a house. Now he’s given so much more. Why? What’s the significance?

Dean flips his phone closed and the snap startles me. “All right, I told Dad about the picture. He’s going to take off and look for a yellow house by a white church where this boy lives. In the meantime, me and you are going to get some food because my stomach’s eating itself alive. Come on, Harley, step on it.”

Hunting with John Winchester has got its advantages and disadvantages. Some disadvantages are that Dean and I have less time by ourselves, to be ourselves. It’s sort of like being chaperoned. But John Winchester’s definitely no ordinary chaperone.

One amazing advantage of hunting with John is that with he tends to be more intuitive and wound up finding the yellow house next to the white church in less than an hour. John calls us when we’re close to finishing a late lunch.

“We need to go back and talk to Bill Carlton,” Dean says when he gets off the phone.

“What? Why? What did John find?” I stuff the last of my cheeseburger in my mouth and wipe my hands on a napkin.

“Dad found the house. Belongs to a Mrs. Sweeney, mother of Peter Sweeney.” Dean pops a fry in his mouth. Chews dramatically.

“And?” I prompt him.

“Peter Sweeney is the boy in Lucas’s drawing. Only, he died thirty-five years ago. Disappeared on his way home from school.” Dean taps his finger on the red bicycle in the picture that we have laid out between us. “Last seen with that bike.”

“What’s the connection to Bill Carlton?”

“Dad said he saw a picture frame surrounded by, get this, a bunch of plastic army men.” He shakes his head. “Picture was of Peter Sweeney and Billy Carlton, nineteen-sixty-eight.”

Dean waves down the waitress and pays the bill. The unyielding dark clouds threaten rain on our way to Bill Carlton’s house. A few stray drops escape and splatter my clean windshield.

“Okay, this little boy Peter Sweeney vanishes, and this is all connected to Bill Carlton somehow?” I say.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Bill sure as hell seems to be hiding something, huh?”

“And Bill, the people he loves, they’re all getting punished.”

“So what if Bill did something to Peter?” Dean suggests.

At the stop sign I look over at Dean. “What if Bill killed him?”

“Peter’s spirit would be furious. It’d want revenge.” Dean shrugs one shoulder. “It’s possible.”

I pull up on the gravel drive of Bill Carlton’s house and park behind his pickup truck. As soon as we step out of the car, an engine roars from the other side of the house. Dean and I take off at a run and come around the house to see Bill driving a small motorized boat out onto the lake. We keep running until we reach the end of the dock.

“Mr. Carlton!” I yell, but my voice doesn’t carry like Dean’s does.

“Mr. Carlton! You need to come back!” Dean’s voice echoes far down the lake, but I’m not sure if Bill can hear over the motor in the boat. “Come out of the water! Turn the boat around!”

The closer Bill gets to the center of the lake, the larger the wake seems to become. It doesn’t subside; instead the waves grow and span out farther around the boat, lifting it higher until it violently flips it backwards and sends Bill crashing into the dark waves. He goes under and doesn’t resurface. After waiting for close to ten minutes, I get the unsettling feeling that we witnessed the mysterious lake monster take another victim.

“What do we do now?” I ask Dean quietly.

Dean glances down at me, a slightly disturbed look on his face. “Call my dad, I guess.” He fishes his phone out of his pocket and hits speed-dial. “Hey, Dad. Yeah, we’re here…No, we didn’t talk to him. He, uh, he’s gone, actually. He went out onto the lake. Something flipped over his boat and he drowned….” Dean gestures to the car and we head back, leaving the dock and the black lake behind us.

I slide into the driver’s seat and put the key in the ignition, but I don’t turn it over. Dean finishes his phone call.

“Dad says we should call the sheriff,” he says uncertainly.

“What? He wants us to _go_ to the authorities? The people who never do anything helpful?”

“We just witnessed a murder. We’ve got to tell _someone_.”

Dean makes the call. We hang out with the radio on, playing some rock ballads in the background, until the sheriff and his possy arrive. Sheriff Jake is a tall, graying man that seems to wear a permanent scowl, which gives the impression that he’s not that thrilled to see us. The news we bring him, however, doesn’t do much to brighten his spirits. He’s a little too distraught at the news. I get that people in his town are dying, but it seems like he’s taking it personally. Then, he shows fear for a brief moment before he orders us back to town to wait for him at the station.

At the sheriff’s station, we pass Andrea and Lucas on their way out. Andrea says hello, and Lucas ends up throwing himself on Dean’s arm, looking stricken. Andrea has to practically drag him out the door. Lucas’s face makes my stomach lurch. It’s like he knows something bad has happened, again.

The Sheriff finally arrives. He silently crosses his office and falls heavily into his desk chair.

“Okay, just so I’m clear, you see…something…attack Bill’s boat, sending Bill, who is a very good swimmer, by the way, into the drink, and you never see him again?” the Sheriff says.

Dean glances at me. “Yeah, that about sums it up.”

“And I’m supposed to believe this, even though I’ve already sonar-swept that entire lake? And what you’re describing is impossible?” Sheriff Jake leans forward, resting his elbows on the desk. “And you’re not really Wildlife Service.”

I keep my composure and silence since I wasn’t around the first time, when John and Dean created our cover story. Dean, however, looks mildly surprised and lost for words.

“That’s right, I checked,” the Sheriff says. “Department’s never heard of you.”

“See, now, we can explain that,” Dean says, chuckling nervously.

Jake holds up his hand and cuts him off. “Enough, please. The only reason you’re breathing free air is one of Bill’s neighbors saw him steering out that boat just before you did. So, we have a couple of options here. I can arrest you two and your friend for impersonating government officials and hold you as material witnesses to Bill Carlton’s disappearance. Or, we can chalk this all up to a bad day, you get in your car, you put this town in your rearview mirror, and you don’t ever darken my doorstep again.”

“Door number two sounds good,” I say quickly.

“That’s the one I’d pick,” the Sheriff says with a dismissive nod.

With that cue to leave, we hurry out of the station and meet John back at the Inn so we can tell our story and pack our stuff.

“Look at that, another case solved and there wasn’t much to it,” I say.

Dean stays quiet. He grabs his duffel and starts carelessly shoving things into it.

“Are you all right?” I ask him.

“I’m not so sure this job is over,” Dean says.

“If Bill murdered Peter Sweeney and Peter’s spirit got its revenge, case closed,” John says. “The spirit should be at rest.”

Dean throws a pair of jeans that he attempted to fold on the bed. “All right, so what if we take off and this thing isn’t done? You know, what if we’ve missed something? What if more people get hurt?”

“But why would you think that?” I say. I start to pack my own things quickly, because I want to get out of here before Dean changes John’s mind. It’s not too soon to try to head back down to Louisiana.

“Because Lucas was really scared,” Dean says.

I narrow my eyes. “That’s what this is about?”

“I just don’t want to leave this town until I know the kid’s okay,” Dean says with a shrug.

I laugh once and walk up to Dean. “Who are you? And what have you done with Dean?”

Dean glares at me. “Shut up.”

“Are you sure about this? It’s pretty late,” I tell Dean a few hours later. We sit in my Camaro, parked on the street in front of Andrea’s house. We almost made it to the interstate before Dean changed his mind.

Dean faces the house. “I’m sure, let’s go.” He heads up to the front door and I walk over to the Impala parked behind us and hang my head down in the passenger’s side window.

“You just going to wait here?” I ask John.

“Yeah, you two go on ahead. I doubt anything is wrong.” John settles into the seat and rests his head back.

I pat the hood of the car and make my way up the front lawn. I see the front door open and Lucas’s red hair bob into view. Dean’s deep voice carries through the night.

“Lucas? Lucas!” Dean turns back to me. “Harley, come on!” Dean takes off inside the house, and I run to catch up.

Lucas and Dean are on the stairs, heading to the second floor. I take the stairs two at a time, a feat for me with my short legs, and given the fact that there’s water pouring down the steps. Lucas bangs frantically on the bathroom door, where water trickles out from under it. Dean tries the handle but it’s locked.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I rang the doorbell and Lucas answered it looking all freaked out.” Dean steers Lucas away from the door before he backs up into the wall. He lunges forward and kicks in the door. It gives way under his heavy boot, and a small wave of dark water gushes out. Lucas grabs Dean, stopping him from entering the bathroom, so I rush in, splashing water everywhere, and see the claw-footed bathtub filled to the brim with black water. A dark figure struggles underneath the surface.

I fall to my knees beside the tub and use the sides of it to brace myself while I plunge my arms in the water and try to pull Andrea out. She struggles and fights against some invisible force holding her down, and since she’s wet and thin as a stick, she keeps slipping out of my hands like a fish. I manage to find her armpits and link my arms underneath them, soaking my entire front in the process, and get her head above water. Andrea gasps and chokes.

“Come on, Andrea,” I urge her, my voice strained from exertion. Whatever’s in there doesn’t want her to come out.

I have Andrea halfway over the side of the tub when something gives her a hard yank and she slips out of my grasp and back under the water.

“No, come on!”

I plunge myself back in – I might as well have gone swimming, I’m so soaked – find her waist and pull with all the strength I’ve got in me. She makes it all the way out of the tub this time and we fall backwards on the tile. I groan and rub my elbows. They got the worst of the fall.

Andrea curls up on her sides and starts choking up water. I grab the towel draped over the toilet and cover her naked body with it. She beings to shiver.

“Andrea,” I say, and give her a slight poke. “Are you okay? We should get you out of here.”

She tries to sit up. “I think I’m okay.”

I help her stand and guide her over to her bedroom. She says she can change by herself, so I leave her and go downstairs. Dean and Lucas are there, sitting on the couch.

“Did you have a nice swim?” Dean asks as soon as he sees me.

I look down at my soaking wet clothes. “Shut up. And Andrea’s fine, by the way. Thanks for your help.”

“Sorry,” Dean says. He jerks his head down at Lucas. “He wouldn’t let me go in there.”

“How nice for you,” I grumble. I trudge out onto the front porch and peel off my wet jacket, hang it on the railing to dry. I put my long-sleeve shirt next to it and stay in my wet tank top. I kick off my shoes and lay out my socks. It’s a cold night so I doubt anything will dry. I poke my head back in the door. “I’m going to go get a change of clothes from the car.”

John’s asleep in the Impala. I hear him snoring through the open window. How nice to be oblivious to the everything that just happened in that house. The lake monster apparently wasn’t satisfied with Bill Carlton’s family and the other victim’s. There’s still something else it wants.

I fish some clean jeans and another long-sleeve shirt out of the trunk. Thankfully I find a clean pair of underwear as well. I’m not so lucky with the socks. My good boots sit soaked on Andrea’s porch, so I grab my spare set of Converse.

John must be tired because he doesn’t even stir when my trunk slams closed. I go back in the house and use the downstairs bathroom to change. After taking off my remaining wet clothes and putting them in a pile on the floor, I stand naked for a while to let my body air-dry before I get dressed.

Andrea comes downstairs about an hour after I return to the living room, where Lucas sleeps on the couch and Dean digs through the bookshelves. Her hair is still wet and she looks incredibly weak and worn out. She falls heavily into an armchair.

I sit down on the edge of the coffee table and face Andrea. “Can you tell me?”

“No.” She shakes her head slightly. “It doesn’t make any sense.” She looks over at Lucas, then back at me, and tears start to fill her eyes. “I’m going crazy.”

“No, no you’re not. Tell me what happened,” I urge her. “Everything.”

Andrea peers out from between her fingers, then runs her hands up her face and through her wet hair before she answers. “I heard…I thought I heard…there was this voice.”

“What did it say?” I ask.

“It said…it said, ‘Come play with me’.” Andrea starts to cry. “What’s happening?” she says between sobs.

Dean brings over a scrapbook and sets it on the table next to me, so Andrea and I can see it. The book is open to a couple of pictures of a group of young boys, labeled “Explorer Troop 37”.

“Do you recognize the kids in these pictures?” Dean asks Andrea.

“What?” Andrea looks closer. “Um, no. I mean, except that’s my dad right there. He must have been about twelve here.” She points to a different picture, one where Jake is standing next to Peter Sweeney. I recognize him from the missing person’s report I looked up after John gave us Peter’s name. Dean raises his eyebrow.

“Chris Barr’s drowning. The connection wasn’t to Bill Carlton. It must have been to the Sheriff,” he says.

I frown. “Bill _and_ the Sheriff. They were both involved with Peter?”

Andrea looks back and forth between Dean and I, confused. “What about Chris? My dad? What are you talking about?”

Something catches Dean’s eye and he turns around. I follow his gaze. At some point Lucas woke up and silently walked to the window. He stands very still, staring out at the black lake. Dawn is breaking over the tops of the trees.

“Lucas?” Dean places his hand on Lucas’s shoulder. “What is it?”

Lucas ignores him. He goes to the back door, opens it, and walks outside. We all get up and follow him.

“Lucas, honey?” Andrea calls after him. But Lucas just keeps walking, and he doesn’t stop until he’s under a large tree. He just stands there and stares at the ground, then at Dean when we get closer.

Dean must have figured out something I haven’t, because he turns around and tells Andrea, “You and Lucas get back to the house and stay there, okay?”

Andrea doesn’t question him. They head back, Andrea practically dragging Lucas, and Dean runs to the nearby shed and emerges with two shovels.

“Want to clue me in here, Dean?” I say, taking a shovel.

“If Jake and Bill killed Peter, what did they do with the bike?” Dean says. He jams the tip of his shovel in the dirt and kicks it in farther with his boot.

Dean and I dig for a few minutes. It doesn’t take long before my shovel clanks against something metal. We glance at each other before tossing our shovels aside and getting on our knees to dig with our hands. Soon, we’ve unearthed a rusty red bicycle, just like the one Lucas drew.

“Peter’s bike,” I say.

“Who are you?” a voice demands from behind us.

I look up and Dean whips around. Sheriff Jake has his gun raised and pointed right at us, a look of wild fury and a slight hint of fear in his eyes.

I hold up my hands as we get to our feet. “Put the gun down, Jake.”

“How did you know that was there?” Jake nods to the bike without lowering the gun.

“What happened?” Dean says, getting angry. “You and Bill killed Peter, drowned him in the lake and then buried the bike? You can’t bury the truth, Jake. Nothing stays buried.”

Jake narrows his eyes. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“You and Bill killed Peter Sweeney thirty-five years ago. That’s what the hell I’m talking about,” Dean spits. “And now you’ve got one seriously pissed-off spirit.”

Andrea must have seen the situation from the house because she runs out to us. “Dad!” she calls, wide-eyed, when she sees the gun.

“It’s going to take Andrea, Lucas, everyone you love,” Dean says icily. “It’s going to drown them, and it’s going to drag their bodies God knows where so you can feel the same pain Peter’s mom felt. And then it’s going to take you, and it’s not going to stop until it does.”

“Yeah, and how do you know that?” Jake says.

“Because that’s exactly what it did to Bill Carlton,” I say.

“Listen to yourselves. You’re insane.” Jake can call us whatever he wants, but when I told him that’s why it took Bill, there was a flash of panic in his eyes.

“I don’t really give a flying fuck what you think of us,” I say. “But if we’re gonna bring down this spirit, we need to find the remains, salt them, and burn them to dust. Now tell me you buried Peter somewhere. Tell me you didn’t just let him go in the lake.”

Jake stays silent. Andrea looks up at her father. “Dad, is any of this true?”

“No,” Jake says, a little too quickly. “Don’t listen to them. They’re liars and they’re dangerous.”

Andrea looks like she doesn’t believe him. “Something tried to drown me. Chris died on that lake. Dad, look at me.” Reluctantly, Jake does. “Tell me you didn’t kill anyone.”

Jake just turns away.

“Oh my God,” Andrea gasps, running her hands through her hair.

“Billy and I were at the lake,” Jake says slowly. “Peter was the smallest one. We always bullied him, but this time, it got rough. We were holding his head under the water.” Jake hangs his head. “We didn’t mean to. But we held him under too long and he drowned. We let the body go and it sank.”

Andrea stands there, horror-struck. Dean glances sideways at me. I shake my head solemnly.

“Oh, Andrea, we were kids,” Jake says helplessly. “We were so scared. It was a mistake. But, Andrea, to say that I have anything to do with these drownings, with Chris, because of some ghost? It’s not rational.”

Dean steps forward, and I can tell he’s had enough. “All right, listen to me, all of you. We need to get you away from this lake, as far as we can, right now.”

Andrea puts her hands on her hips and looks up at the sky, which is dark for this time of morning, like she can’t believe this is her life. When she looks back down, she gasps. We all turn and see Lucas down on the docks.

“Lucas!” Jake yells.

The four of us take off running. Lucas kneels down and leans over the edge of the dock, reaching for something in the water.

“Lucas!” Dean shouts.

“Lucas! Baby, stay where you are!” Andrea yells desperately.

But we’re too late. Dean and I reach the dock first, just as Lucas falls headfirst into the water. Dean and I don’t stop. We put on a burst of speed and dive into the lake, one after the other.

The water is ice cold and knocks the breath out of me as soon as I’m submerged. I come up for air immediately, even though I had prepared my body to be underwater for at least a minute. I tread water to hold myself up.

“Oh, my God!” Andrea says. She starts to take off her jacket.

“Andrea, stay there!” I yell.

“No! Lucas!”

“We’ll get him! Just stay on the dock!”

Dean still hasn’t come up for air, so I dive under again. The lack of sun makes it hard to see in the dark water. Under the surface there’s a green tint to everything and I can’t see my hand in front of my face. I search for Lucas blind. I kick around with my hands outstretched until I can’t hold my breath any longer. I pop up at the surface a little ways away from Dean.

“Harley?” he calls. I shake my head.

“Lucas, where are you?” Andrea cries anxiously.

Dean and I dive down. I resume my blind-man search. Just when I start to think this is useless and we’re wasting precious minutes of Lucas’s life, I reach something that feels like a body. I latch onto it but it struggles against me. Me and whatever the thing is surface, and I see that all I found was Dean.

“What the hell?” he says.

“Sorry! I can’t see a thing under there.”

Suddenly, Andrea screams, “Daddy! No!”

Dean and I look around. I spot Jake over by the edge of the trees and nudge Dean. Jake takes off his jacket as he wades into the water.

“Jake!” Dean shouts near my ear. I duck away, wanting to keep my hearing. “Get out of the water!”

“Just let it be over!” he yells back.

“Oh, my god, Dean,” I say, and point to a dark gray mass that emerges from the lake in front of Jake. As the water runs off it, black hair becomes more prominent around the gray skin.

“It’s Peter,” Dean says.

Peter’s head bobs closer to Jake. He reaches out with a gray, wrinkled hand and pulls Jake down. Andrea screams. Jake doesn’t resurface, but with Peter occupied, that means Lucas is free somewhere.

“Let’s go,” I tell Dean.

This is our last chance to find Lucas. We kick off in opposite directions, spreading out. I try to go deeper because I know now that Lucas must be unconscious and sinking, but I don’t make it very far. I shoot to the surface. Andrea looks at me expectantly. I just shake my head. She starts to cry and call for Lucas.

I know I shouldn’t give up, but honestly, I don’t think we’re going to find Lucas. Alive, at least. We might find his body if the police sweep the lake. Now that Peter has what he wants he has no reason to hide Lucas. I’m about to tell Andrea this, too, but thankfully I never get the chance.

To my right, Dean breaks the surface and gasps loudly for air. In his arms is an unconscious Lucas. Dean was under the water for a long time and he looks lightheaded. I swim over to him and take the kid, since Dean can barely keep himself above water, let alone a soaking wet dead-weight boy. I hold Lucas on my chest like an otter and swim backwards to shore. Dean follows behind me slowly. Andrea sprints down the dock and into the water and takes her son from me. 

The three of us crowd around Lucas on the gravely shore. Andrea taps his face to try to revive him. Those light taps aren’t going to do a thing, but I’m not about to go over there and start slapping her kid. Silently, Dean moves her over and shakes Lucas roughly. Lucas opens his mouth and coughs up water. I can’t believe he’s alive.

“What’s going on?”

We all look up. John walks towards us, looking ruffled from sleeping upright in the car all night. Andrea and I stand up and Dean picks up Lucas and carries him to the house.

“Long story, Dad,” Dean says when we pass. “But job’s over now.”

Two hours later I stand on Andrea’s back porch in dry clothes once more, staring out at the lake. There’s a color difference in the gravel around the perimeter of the water, where the level has already started to go down.

The screen door opens and snaps shut. I don’t turn around. Dean comes to my side.

“You okay?”

I shrug.

“What are you thinking about?” 

A few moments pass before I answer. “I always thought I could protect kids from this stuff. Keep them from knowing what we know. We haven’t been doing that great of a job at that since we started working together. Haley, Ben, Tommy, Charlie, Michael, now Lucas. We keep ruining their lives. And people keep dying while we’re on the job.”

“We’re not going to save everybody,” Dean says gently. “You told me that in Ohio, remember?”

I look away, because I remember. It’s just easier to accept the fact that we aren’t going to save everybody when I’m not the one upset about it.

“It’s not all bad,” Dean continues spiritedly. “We saved Tommy and Charlie. All those kids in Fitchburg. And hey, Lucas is talking again.”

“Yeah.”

“Come on, let’s get going.”

We walk back through the house and meet John by the cars. Andrea and Lucas follow us out, Lucas carrying a tray of sandwiches and fruit covered in plastic wrap.

“We made you lunch for the road,” Andrea says. “Lucas insisted on making the sandwiches himself.”

“Can I give it to them now?” Lucas asks.

“Of course.” Andrea smiles and kisses her son’s head.

“Come on, Lucas, let’s load this into the car,” Dean says.

“How are you holding up?” I ask Andrea.

She folds her arms over her chest. “It’s just gonna take a long time to sort through everything, you know?”

I sigh. “I’m sorry.” Maybe I should pick up a book on condolences or how to comfort people. My dad was always the empathetic one.

Andrea shakes her head. “You saved my son. I can’t ask for more than that. Dad loved me. He loved Lucas. No matter what he did, I just have to hold on to that.”

I stay silent. We watch Dean and Lucas together.

“All right, if you’re gonna be talking now, this is a very important phrase, so I want you to repeat it one more time,” Dean instructs the kid.

“Zeppelin rules!” Lucas says with enthusiasm.

“That’s right. Up high.” Dean holds up his hand and Lucas meets it for a high-five, grinning. “You take care of your mom, okay?”

“All right.”

“He’s really great, isn’t he?” Andrea says.

I look sideways at her. She has a dreamy look on her face. Only with her comment do I let myself turn back to Dean and feel this lightness fill my chest.

“Yeah, he is,” I say breathlessly.

Andrea walks over to Dean. He smiles at her. Before my brain processes what’s happening, before I can open my mouth and say something, anything, to get Dean’s attention, Andrea reaches up on her toes and kisses Dean. It’s quick, over with faster than I could snap my fingers, but it still makes that lightness I had felt in my chest moments ago feel as heavy as lead.

I can’t read Dean’s expression. He smiles at Andrea again, but it’s different. More polite than friendly. He scratches his head and then turns around.

“Harley, move your ass. We’ve gotta hit the road,” he calls with his back to me.

My face must be a sight because John looks at me peculiarly, much like the look he gave me at the diner when Dean was flirting with the waitress. I try to keep my composure as I walk past them to get to my Camaro.

Dean tries to follow me, but John stops him. “Dean, ride with me.”

“I don’t want Harley to drive alone,” Dean says.

“I’m fine,” I say quickly.

Dean looks at me, puzzled. “Want a sandwich, at least?”

I try my best to avoid looking at John when I say, “No, thanks, I’m not hungry.”

I get in my car and drive away, hoping the tire’s don’t squeal or make black marks on the road as I gun it. Or maybe, I hope they do. Nice, big fat streaks of burned rubber that Andrea can keep as a reminder.

We had made plans to drive up to Copper Harbor, Michigan so I could see Lake Superior. John said if we’re lucky we might even see the northern lights in the evening. It would have been a great way to spend my birthday, if I didn’t have that mental image of Andrea kissing Dean playing through my head on repeat and making me want to vomit every time it looped around.


	6. The Benders

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ok, maybe it's THIS chapter that I can safely say is 85% mine.  
> Dean and Harley's relationship is tested in a huge way. Also, I bring Bobby into the story for the first time. I hope I got his personality right. I LOVE Bobby ("Get the hell off my property before I blast you so full of rock salt you crap margaritas!" Bahahaa).  
> The ending is incredibly cheesy and it makes me really uncomfortable to read the words I wrote back in 2014, so I can only imagine how it would make you feel. Hah. But like I said before, I don't have the heart to change it. It reminds me how far I've come.

It’s just me and my Camaro the entire drive up to Copper Harbor. I don’t see the Impala at all, even with a small delay of a pit stop for gas. Whether that’s because they take a different route or because I push a hundred miles per hour – the fastest I’ve dared to go for this length of time – I can’t say. I’m glad John made Dean go with him. I really can’t be around anyone right now.

There’s no point in denying it any longer. I have feelings for Dean. I’m pretty sure I can live with that. The next thing to figure out is, can I live with that if he doesn’t feel the same and I keep working with him? I’d have to deal with so much worse than just a thank-you kiss from a grateful person we help.

Twice on my journey the answer to that question became _No_ and I almost changed course and left Dean and John forever. But I literally have nowhere to go; there would be no point in doing that. So I drive on, watching the busy freeways become small two-lane highways again.

It’s a beautiful drive, I have to admit. The closer I get to Copper Harbor, the more the fall colors in the trees stand out. At one point I enter this sort of natural tunnel that surrounds me for miles in large, beautiful trees with leaves of varying shades of reds, oranges and browns. Their branches extend over the highway, forming the tunnel. Hardly any of the leaves have fallen yet. The trees are still thick and they sway in the breeze, making it seem as if I drive through fire.

Oh, the irony of that, since my heart feels like it’s engulfed in flames.

I emerge at the other end of the tunnel to find a long, twisting highway leading down to the harbor. That’s not the reason I slow my car down to nearly ten miles per hour, though. Spread out before me like a vast blanket of blue is Lake Superior. It’s nearly sunset, and the fire I drove through in the trees is now in the sky, reflecting off the waves crashing into the rocky cliff. The town is down to the right, sitting happy in the light from the setting sun.

“Wow,” I whisper. I drive slowly the rest of the way, drinking in every inch of the scenery. I can’t believe I’ve missed something this beautiful all the times I’ve been in Wisconsin or Michigan.

I choose the nicer of the two shore-front hotels only to find out that it closes for business in mid-October and doesn’t open again until early spring. I grumble and drive over to King Copper Motel and get two rooms with access to the lake. At least it’s got that much.

Copper Harbor must not be very busy this time of year. It’s cold, there’s a thin layer of ice around the shore even though it’s only going to be November. I pull my leather jacket tighter around me as I walk through the small town.

More out of courtesy than out of caring, I send Dean a text message to let him know where I am. But it’s nothing more than the name of the motel. Let him figure it out from there.

I come across a nice restaurant called the Harbor Haus and my stomach gives a long, low grumble. I’m absolutely starving. I send Dean another text, this one with just the name of the restaurant, and in response I get a phone call. Reluctantly, I answer it.

“Hello,” I say dully.

“Hey. How’d you get there so fast?” Dean asks.

“Drove fast.” I browse the menu in a glass display outside of the entrance, hardly paying attention to the conversation.

“Are you okay, Harley?” Dean sounds concerned, and that bothers me. I can’t have the person causing my problems also be the one that consoles me.

“I’m fine. See you when you get here.”

“Okay. We’re on Highway forty-one. In some weird tree thing. See you soon.”

I hang up before he does.

It’s probably not a good idea for me to have an attitude when John and Dean get here because they’ll only bug me until they find out what’s wrong and I can’t exactly tell them the truth. So I go inside the restaurant, order a drink, and munch on breadsticks while I sit out on the deck and wait.

My second drink is well under way when John and Dean arrive. I gesture to the open deck with a half-eaten breadstick.

“Have a seat,” I say grandly. The alcohol loosened me up and I’m in a bit of a better mood. Hopefully better enough so they don’t ask questions.

“Fancy place,” Dean says, looking around as he sits down.

“What can I say, I have good taste.” I take a sip of my drink. “Let’s order. I’m starving.”

The waiter comes by as if on cue. He’s tall, handsome, and just as I consider getting back at Dean by flirting with him, the waiter opens his mouth and introduces himself in the most flamboyantly gay way possible. I roll my eyes. There goes _that_.

Despite the mild unspoken tension between Dean and I, dinner is nice. The food is great, the view is unbelievably breathtaking. We drink, John tells us a few stories. Some of them involve my dad and I get nostalgic and a little bit depressed. When Dean senses this he reaches over and touches my hand gently while John orders another drink. I didn’t have the energy to pull away in time to make it look like I wasn’t actually enjoying it.

John leaves us at the table and says he has to go do some work. He tosses two hundred dollar bills down before he goes.

“Want another drink?” Dean asks me. We’ve both had plenty, but what the hell. It’s not like we have a job to go to tomorrow.

We have a few more drinks before the restaurant kicks us out. We pay and walk down the back stairs that lead right to the beach.

Dean and I are pretty drunk, which makes everything that happens pretty funny. Like Dean tripping on the very last stair and falling on his knees in the sand. And me laughing so hard at him falling that I stumble backwards and trip myself. Spirits are so high that I’ve almost forgotten why I was ever mad at Dean in the first place.

Once we’re on our feet, we stumble off in the direction of our motel, leaning on each other for support. Dean is so tall and heavy that when he stupidly trusts me to be able to carry his weight and my own, we end up staggering towards the water and crunching through the thin ice where the edge of the ocean has frozen onto the sand, and I get soaked up to my knees.

“Damn,” I whine. “If I keep this up all of the clothes I own are gonna be _wet_.” I still have the pile of wet clothes from the past two days in my trunk. I need to do laundry soon.

Dean laughs and pushes me farther in the water, just as a wave comes crashing onto the shore and slaps me on the back.

“What the hell, Dean?” I yell.

He doubles over laughing, and I see my chance.

“That’s it,” I growl as I run and tackle him with all of my strength. It wouldn’t have done much if he wasn’t drunk and already halfway to the ground. He stumbles but catches himself on his palms. I leap on his back and try to steer him to the water. All I do is succeed in re-soaking his legs.

“You’re going to have to try harder than that, Harley,” Dean says, still laughing, and takes off at a wobbly sprint down the beach. I bounce along on his back, feeling sick as the seafood pasta and alcohol get swirled around in my stomach.

“Dean! Put me down!” I hit his shoulders when he doesn’t listen. “Seriously, put me down, put me down, put me down! I’m gonna be sick!”

Dean stops in his tracks and lets go without warning me, and I fall off his back and land flat on my ass. That only brings around more laughter from him. I get up and wipe the sand from my backside.

“Very funny,” I say, and stomp the last few yards to our motel room. Dean and I are sharing since John still wants to be by himself.

“So what, you’re just gonna run away mad again?”

I turn around to face him just as I reach the sliding glass door. “What do you mean ‘again’?”

“You just took off this morning all pissed. And then you lied and said you were fine.”

“I _am_ fine.” I spread my arms wide. “Don’t I look fine?” I slide the key down the lock. It beeps and the light flashes green. I go in and Dean follows.

“My dad told me you were upset about what Andrea did.”

I scrunch up my face, scoff and try to play it off. But I’m not that good. Especially when I’m drunk. “I wasn’t upset.”

Dean takes off his jacket and throws it on the chair. “Harley, you’re a terrible liar.”

I cross my arms over my chest and give in. I’m tired and wet and I want to go to sleep, and the only way to do that is to get this conversation over with. “Fine. You got me. It bugged me…a little. Happy now?”

“Why did it bother you?”

“Really, Dean?” I sigh. “It just did. Why can’t we leave it at that?”

“Because it shouldn’t bother you,” he says. He doesn’t sound nice at all, either.

My throat burns a little and I feel a flush of warmth under my skin, the feeling I get when I anticipate something I want to hear but know I’ll regret.

“Why shouldn’t it bother me if someone else kisses you? Or if you’re flirting with another girl right in front of my face?” I say angrily.

“Because I’m not yours, Harley! We hunt together. We aren’t in a relationship.” The way he says it, so emotionless. Actually angry. It cuts me deep.

I sort of blew my cover and there’s no way to fix it. “I know,” I say dismissively.

In the silence, I think about our one night together. At the bar in Ohio, we only had a little bit to drink and he was still coming on to me. What changed?

 _Nothing changed, you idiot_ , I tell myself hatefully. Dean’s a _guy_. He wants what he wants when he wants it. I just happened to be around that time he wanted it.

“I’m going to go to bed,” I say, my voice strained from my throat trying to strangle me from the inside. As if my heart wasn’t already trying to do that. I rush off to the bathroom before the burning hot anger turns into tears. That would just frustrate me.

“Harley, wait.” Dean jumps forward and grabs my wrist. I try to wriggle out of his grasp but he’s too strong. “I’m sorry.”

“What for? You didn’t do anything.”

He grabs my shoulders until I stop fighting him. “I’m sorry for giving you the wrong impression in Ohio. I shouldn’t have let it go that far. I thought you could handle it.”

“ _What_?” I shriek, a few octaves too high. “You think I couldn’t _handle_ sleeping with you?”

“Obviously you thought it was more than that. You’ve been acting strange ever since that night. It’s my–”

“Shut up,” I snap. I point my finger at him threateningly. “Don’t say it’s your fault. This is stupid.”

“But it is my fault. And I can’t blame you. I mean, I knew you liked me when we were kids. I just thought you would have moved on by now–”

I don’t know why, I don’t know what makes me do it, but I jerk back my arm, make a fist, and punch him in the jaw so hard I feel his teeth clatter.

“Ow,” I mutter, cradling my stinging hand in my good one.

Dean stumbles back, dumbfounded, hand pressed against his jaw. When he regains his composure, he stretches his jaw, testing the joints. Aside from the small red welt, he’s fine.

Should I walk away? Apologize? Explain myself? I’m just as confused as he looks.

“Dean, you were my best friend,” I say, careful to use the past tense. “I cared about you and had feelings for you even before we slept together. I just never admitted it to myself. I didn’t want to. And after we did it all I could think about was, how I could make it so that what happened wouldn’t change anything? Because I know we can’t be together. Even if you happened to feel the same, it would be too dangerous.” I clench and unclench my fist a few times, avoiding Dean’s eyes. I stare at his boots, which are caked with wet sand, take a deep breath and say, “I couldn’t help the way I felt. The way I _feel_.” I look up at him. “So I’ll leave in the morning. Alone.”

Dean stays quiet. I really don’t expect him to say anything. This isn’t some cheesy romance movie where after the big fight the girl admits her feelings and it turns out the guy feels the same and it’s happily ever after. It’s just me and Dean and our dysfunctional situation.

I turn to head to the bathroom, but Dean grabs me once more. He pulls me back to him, slides his hands on either side of my face and presses his open mouth to mine. I don’t fight him. I wrap my arms around his neck and kiss him deeper.

Last time this happened everything was soft, passionate. This is different. Rougher. Dean rips off my wet shirt and I get him out of his. We kiss wildly, grabbing at each other. We’re undressed and in the bed in less than a minute.

Our hot, sweaty bodies rock the bed and we go at it for a while. I think it’s different because we’re both pissed off at each other. Apparently angry drunk sex is good sex.

At one point I stop kissing him and say sarcastically, “Is this our thing now, getting drunk and doing it?”

“Shut up,” he says. He rolls me over roughly and bites my lip before going in me so hard and vigorously that it’s almost painful, but I don’t tell him to stop.

Afterwards we lay on our backs, breathing hard. It’s a small bed; we lay close together, our bodies touching. I don’t like it because I’m still mad at him. He belittled me and treated me like I was a child or some stupid teenage girl with her first crush. Thinking about this sends a fresh wave of anger over me and I sit up.

“What’s wrong?” Dean asks. He touches my arm gently. That only fuels my anger.

“This doesn’t change anything,” I say quietly.

“Are you still going to leave in the morning?”

“I don’t know,” I say to the wall. I go to the bathroom, pee and splash cold water on my face, and then go to the empty bed and try to fall asleep between the cold, coarse sheets. Dean rolls over, his back to me, and pulls the covers up to his chin.

Surprisingly, things are okay in the morning, as if we worked out our anger with sex. Dean lets me borrow his shirt – since he ripped mine – so I can go outside to my car and get the clothes I didn’t bring in last night. I have to ignore the slight purple discoloration at the edge of his jaw.

Outside, I slam my trunk shut with this fleeting thought that Dean’s only being nice to me so I won’t leave. Who else would be the easiest booty call in the world while we’re on the road?

I storm back into our motel room like a freaking hurricane, only to find John sitting at our table and Dean at the edge of his bed. I’m suddenly very aware that I’m only wearing Dean’s shirt and my underwear, and that sends burning hot embarrassment flooding to my cheeks. I run to the bathroom and slam the door.

While I change I silently thank myself for putting my old clothes in the trunk so I literally have nothing left in the room I would have to go back for. I could just make a run for my car when I’m done here and take off and never see John and Dean Winchester again.

If only I were that lucky.

I forget how well Dean knows me. When I throw open the bathroom door in preparation to sprint for the exit, I nearly trip over my own feet at the sight of Dean standing at the front door like a sentinel, blocking my easiest way out. Okay, Plan B. The back door. I spin around, see John still at the table. There goes my only other option. I feel trapped, like a cornered animal.

“Morning, Harley,” John says casually. “Have a seat.”

“I’m fine standing, thanks.”

“I heard you were leaving.”

“That’s right,” I say, but my voice doesn’t sound as sure as I’d like it to be.

“Maybe you could stick around for one more job,” John says. He opens his journal and pushes it to the center of the table. “We need your help with this one.”

I try to resist but my curiosity gets the better of me. “Why do you need me? Two’s enough.”

John gives his journal a little push. I roll my eyes and walk over to the table, slump down in a chair, pull the journal closer.

“Hibbing, Minnesota. Hunting grounds of a phantom attacker.” John points to a drawing on one page. “There’s lots of local folklore about a dark figure that comes out at night. Grabs people, then vanishes. That county has more missing persons per capita than anywhere else in the state.”

As nonchalantly as I can, I say, “And?”

John glances at Dean, eyebrow raised. It seems like Dean said that’s all it would take to get me interested enough to stay.

“You have written here that the last reported missing persons case was over a year ago,” I say, skimming over the pages in the journal.

“Until now,” John says.

“Before a year ago, people would go missing like clockwork,” Dean says. “That went on for over twenty years. Then it stopped. Why did it start up again? Why did it stop in the first place?”

This definitely sounds like an interesting job. I don’t think John found this case with the intention of bribing me to stay, either. That must have been Dean’s influence, which brings me back around to the question – why does Dean want me to stay so badly? And that’s not a question I want to think about answering right now because it would involve me thinking about Dean and how he feels and what his motives are and that’s all going to be circumstantial because I’m not really inside his head. It’s just better if I leave.

“That’s cool and all, but it seems like a two-man job.” I get up and try to walk to the front door. “Thanks for trying to get me to stay,” I tell Dean, almost mockingly.

Against my better wishes, Dean follows me out to my car. “Please stay,” he says gruffly, like he’s not used to begging for what he wants. “Just one more case.”

“Why?” I practically yell.

Dean purses his lips. “Because I don’t want to be the reason you leave.”

I don’t know whether to be shocked or pissed off. Frankly, I’m too tired and emotionally drained to care. “Fine. One more case.”

“Fine.”

And that’s how I find myself on a 340 mile drive to Hibbing, Minnesota. Dean and I drive together in my Camaro, following John in the Impala. It’s nearly a seven hour drive but we make good time since we managed to get an early start.

Dean and I keep the music obnoxiously loud and the windows down so we don’t have to speak. That makes the time go by rather slowly but at least we aren’t fighting. About an hour and a half after we cross the border into Minnesota, we turn from Interstate 37 to Highway 5, and John calls Dean.

“Okay, so when we get to Hibbing you and I are going to go talk to the witness in Alvin Jenkins’s disappearance and Dad’s going to Jenkins’ apartment,” Dean informs me.

“All right.”

“The witness is an eleven-year-old boy, Evan McKay. He and his mom live in some apartments next to a mini mart, where Jenkins was supposedly taken from. Evan was home alone when it happened.”

“Who do you want to be this time?” I ask. “FBI wouldn’t care. There’s no Department of Anything that would be involved.”

“We’ll just be state police then…Aw, crap.” Dean starts dialing on his phone.

“What?”

“Our police clothes are in the Impala – hey, Dad. Can you pull over? I need something out of the trunk before we split up.”

John stops the Impala on the side of the road and I come up behind him. Dean runs out, ducks his head in the driver’s side window, then goes to the trunk. He gets our cover costumes, closes the trunk and pats it. John takes off and Dean gets back into my car.

“Here you go, Officer–”

“Ball. You can be Officer Arnaz.” I pull back onto the road.

“Are you still trying to push the _I Love Lucy_ thing?”

“I love that show, it’s a classic. And this being my last case and all, I thought I could pick the names.”

That shuts Dean up for the next fifty miles.

We reach the McKay’s apartment around five in the evening dressed as state police. Mrs. McKay answers it.

“Good evening. I’m Officer…Arnaz. This is my partner, Officer Ball.” Dean smiles and we both flash official badges. “Can we ask your son a few question about what occurred at Rocket’s Mini Mart four days ago?”

A young boy, Evan, presumably, pokes his head around the door. “Sure,” he says, before his mother can say a word.

Mrs. McKay stands back to let us in the small apartment, but she doesn’t look all that happy to be doing so. “I know you’re just doing your job, but the police have been here all week already. I don’t see why we have to go through this again. The more he tells the story, the more he believes it’s true.”

“Mrs. McKay, we know you spoke with the local authorities,” I begin.

“But, uh, this seems like a matter for the state police,” Dean continues.

I turn to the kid. “Don’t worry about how crazy it sounds, Evan. Just tell us what you saw.”

“I was up late, watching TV,” Evan says. “That’s when I heard this weird noise.”

“What did it sound like?” I ask.

“It sounded like…a monster,” Evan says hesitantly. His eyes shift to his mother. He probably wouldn’t be as uncomfortable telling us what happened if his mother wasn’t staring him down like a hawk.

“Tell the officers what you were watching on TV,” Mrs. McKay says. She sounds like she’s fighting an eye roll.

“ _Godzilla versus Mothra_ ,” Evan says with a sheepish smile.

Dean’s face breaks out into a wide grin. “That’s my favorite Godzilla movie,” he says excitedly. “It’s so much better than the original, huh?”

“Totally,” Evan says with a smile.

Dean nods to me. “She likes the remake.”

Evan eyes me disapprovingly. I glare at Dean. He clears his throat and looks at the floor.

“Evan, did you see what this thing was?” I ask.

“No. But I saw it grab the man. It pulled him underneath the car.”

“Then what?”

“It took him away.” Evan shrugs. “I heard the monster leaving. It made this really scary sound. Like a…like this…whining growl.” Evan shudders at the memory. Mrs. McKay puts her arm around her son. Dean and I take the hint.

“Thanks for your time,” I say.

John came up empty-handed at Jenkins’ apartment and instead found Kugel’s Keg, a biker bar somewhere off a practically deserted highway. Dean and I meet John there, in our regular clothes, after we’re done at the McKay’s. John is in the back next to a dart board, a half-empty glass of beer in front of him. I sit down and open my dad’s journal while Dean goes to the bar for beers and some food.

“Any news?” I ask John.

“Well, local police haven’t ruled out foul play,” he says. “Apparently, there _were_ signs of a struggle.”

“Don’t you think this could just be a kidnapping?” I ask.

John keeps his eyes on me as he takes a swig of beer. “No."

Dean rejoins us and sets a bottle down in front of me and takes a long drink from his own.

“So, I don’t get it,” Dean says. “Don’t phantom attackers usually snatch people from their beds? Jenkins was taken from a parking lot.”

“Well, there are all kinds,” John says. “You know, Springhill Jacks, phantom gassers. They take people anywhere, anytime.”

“So we’ve got one missing person in the past thirteen months and absolutely no evidence to go on except he was dragged under a car and there was a whining growl after it happened?” I sit back in my chair. “We’re gonna need something more to go on.”

“We’ve worked with less before,” Dean says. “But there’s nothing else we can do tonight.” He glances at the dartboard next to John, then the cup of darts in the middle of the table. He slides the cup over to me. “How about a rematch?”

“You mean how about I kick your ass again?” I don’t want to play, but I’m not going to pass on an opportunity to show up Dean. I grab a handful of darts. “Let’s go, pretty boy.”

We play for about an hour. A waitress brings our food and we take bites here and there between our turns. John keeps score for us and, of course, I win. Dean slumps down into his chair and drains the last of his beer.

John takes out his wallet. “I saw a motel about five miles back. Let’s get going.”

“Whoa, whoa, easy,” Dean says. “Let’s have another round.”

“We should get an early start.”

“Yeah, you really know how to have fun, don’t you, Grandma?”

John just stares, eyes narrowed.

“All right, I’ll meet you guys outside. I gotta take a leak.” Dean grabs his jacket and heads to the bathroom.

I close my dad’s journal and tuck it under my arm. John and I walk out together. “Where did you park?” he asks.

“Over there,” I say, pointing to the back of the bar. “You?”

“I’m around the corner. Go south on this road for a few miles, you’ll see a sign for the motel,” John says.

“Okay. See you in a bit. I’ll wait for Dean.”

I stop at my car and lean against the hood. Watch the Impala drive by on the road, its’ engine roaring gorgeously. The night is cool, with a refreshing late fall breeze. Clouds cover the moon and most of the sky. I take a deep breath, let the air out through my nose.

I hear rustling and a metal clanking noise from somewhere under the cars. I set my dad’s journal on the hood and take a small flashlight out of my jacket. I shine the light around. Nothing seems out of the ordinary. When I kneel down and point the flashlight under the cars, a scrawny cat hisses at me and runs away.

I jump and fall back, then laugh at myself quietly. I get to my feet and dust off my jeans. Dean should be done by now. I look around the parking lot. Instead of seeing cars and the bar, my brain only registers that something tightened around my ankles. Whatever has me gives a hard pull and I fall flat on my face and get dragged back. I drop the flashlight and it rolls to the middle of the road.

The last thing I see is the underside of my car before everything goes black.

My head throbs, worse than a hangover. Every time I make the slightest move I get poked by what feels like hundreds of tiny, sharp things, and the irritation from that just intensifies the pounding in my head. The air is thick, muggy, and smells like someone threw cow shit in a room and closed the door.

Slowly, very slowly, I open my eyes. Immediately I close them, because what I saw can’t be true. That wasn’t a run-down barn I was in. Those weren’t rusted metal bars surrounding me.

That irrational fear I had of the monsters I hunt capturing me during my dream the first night I spent with Dean doesn’t seem so irrational anymore.

I open my eyes again because I’ve got no other choice and sit up. It turns out that what’s poking me is just a layer of stale hay on the bottom of the cage.

Cage. The word makes me cringe. But that’s what it is. I’m in a cage.

I rattle the metal bars, for good measure, and find that they’re unusually sturdy. I guess the pitiable state of the barn led me to believe that maybe the cage was of poor quality as well. To my left is another cage of similar design, with a raggedy man asleep in it, scrunched up in the corner. At least I’ll have company.

I start to panic. I can’t think of anything better to do than try to kick down the door of the cage. I lean back on the ground and give several hard blows with my feet, but all I succeed in doing is hurting my ankles and waking up the man next to me.

The man groans and rolls over. I take a closer look and find that I recognize him. Muddy brown eyes. Stringy graying brown hair. Long, mousy face. He looks a little worse for wear, but that’s still him. I rush over to the set of bars that separate us.

“You’re alive,” I say, finding my voice hoarse and scratchy. I clear my throat and the man groans again. “Hey, you okay?”

“Does it look like I’m doin’ okay?” the man grumbles as he sits up.

“Where are we?”

“I don’t know. The country, I think.” The man sniffs the putrid air and nods once. “Smells like the country.”

“You’re Alvin Jenkins, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

I sigh. “I was looking for you.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jenkins says. I nod. “Well, no offense, but this is a piss-poor rescue.”

I bring my knees up to my chest and wrap my arms around them. “Well, my friend and his dad are out there right now, too…looking, I mean. So, maybe–”

“So? They’re not gonna find us,” he says gruffly. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. Waiting for them to come back and do God knows what to us.”

He inclines his head towards a small door, where whatever captured us makes a regular entrance. The only other way out, two large sliding wood doors, has a thin strip of light between. They must lead outside.

“What are they?” I ask. “Whatever took us. Have you seen them?”

Jenkins furrows his brows. “What are you talking about?”

“Whatever’s got us, what did they look like?”

The small door bursts open and I jump back, my heart beating out of my chest. Jenkins whispers, “See for yourself,” before retreating to the corner of his cage.

Two large figures in dirty black ponchos enter. The hoods obscure their faces and gloves cover their hands. What could they be? Demons? They resemble humans. They appear very solid as one goes to Jenkins’ cage and kicks the side of it. The other goes to a large post next to my cage and inserts a key into a panel attached to it. It presses a button and Jenkins’ door unlocks. The first figure ducks and enters the cage and Jenkins puts his hands over his face defensively.

“Leave me alone!” Jenkins yells. “Don’t you take me, leave me alone!”

But all the figure does is throw a plate of mush in front of Jenkins and make threatening jabs at him. Then it retreats, and the same figure that opened the cage twists the key and the door bolts shut. As they turn to leave, one of them growls, and my jaw drops. The thin sliver of light between the barn doors falls on the figure’s face, revealing a man. Dirty white skin, rotten teeth, but a man just the same.

Jenkins watches them leave with beady eyes before he starts to devour the food.

“I’ll be damned,” I mutter. “They’re just people.”

“Yeah, what’d you expect?” Jenkins says with a mouthful of mush.

“How often do they feed you?” I hope I don’t get hungry because whatever he’s eating doesn’t look very appetizing.

“Once a day. And they use that thing over there to open the cage.” Jenkins points to the panel with the hand that’s not holding the tin plate.

“And that’s the only time you see them?”

“So far. But I’m waitin’.”

“Waiting for what?”

Jenkins narrows his eyes. “Ned Beatty time, man.”

“I think that’s the least of your worries right now.”

“Oh, yeah? What do you think they want then, huh?”

I shrug. “Depends on who they are.”

Jenkins tosses his empty plate aside. “They’re a bunch of psycho hillbilly rednecks, if you ask me. Lookin’ for love in all the wrong places.”

I look away and slowly lay down on the hard, hay-strewn floor. It hurts to think about Dean and John and what they could be doing. I want to believe that they’re looking for me. And if not for me, at least for Jenkins. But after the way I treated them, treated Dean, I wouldn’t be surprised if they gave up and left me here to die.

I must have fallen asleep. I jerk awake sometime later and notice the light behind the wood doors is gone. Jenkins is asleep in his cage, leaning against the bars like a passed-out drunk. My stomach grumbles, and I know the only way I can stop thinking about hunger right now is to go back to sleep.

The creaking of hinges and heavy footfalls fill the room. Something rattles between a square of the metal bars. I don’t have to wonder what it is for too long because it gets jammed into my shoulder.

The two men are back. One of them is at the control panel. The other is in front of my cage, poking the end of a rake inside it and ramming it into every part of my body he can reach. Which is practically every part.

I push the wooden pole to the side the next time he tries to hit me. “Cut it out,” I say. That earns me a nice blow to the head and I fall to the side, unconscious.

When I come to there’s a plate of mush in front of me identical to the one Jenkins got. Jenkins said he gets fed once a day. If that calculates to once every twenty-four hours, that means I’ve already been held captive for an entire day. The thought makes me sick to my stomach.

I sniff the mush and gag. It smells like rotten meat. I push it away and lay back down. My shoulder is sore from where the man in the black coat jammed the end of the rake into it, and my head feels like it’s on fire. A few other places on my body hurt if I move them the wrong way. I hope Dean’s out there looking for me. I don’t want to die like this.

Sometime later the men return and give Jenkins another plate of food. The light shining through the wood-panel doors isn’t as bright anymore, drawing to a close yet another day here. After they leave, I look around the barn, trying to distract myself from the sucking and slurping sounds Jenkins makes.

I notice a long electrical cable hanging from the post near me. It runs just above my cage and connects to the panel. For something to do, I reach out through one of the squares and wave my arm around, hoping to catch it and maybe screw up the electricity. My arm is too short. I sit back, rethink my approach.

An opening three squares over might give me a better chance at grasping it if I bend my arm the wrong way, but just for a little bit. It works, and I end up grabbing hold of the cable with one hand. I slip my other hand through the next metal square and take hold of the cable. With both hands I yank and pull and twist the cable. It doesn’t do much.

Jenkins stops licking his plate. “What’s your name?”

“Harley,” I say, grunting with the effort of tugging on the wire.

“Why don’t you give it up, Harley. There’s no way out.”

I ignore him. The cable gets slippery with sweat from my palms. I pull the sleeves of my dirty shirt over my hands and use them as makeshift gloves. That helps, but only minimally. At least I get a good enough grip to finally get the cable down. It bursts out of the beam, showering down splinters of wood and a small piece of metal that clanks down through the bars.

“What is it?” Jenkins asks curiously.

I sift through the hay and wood and pick up the piece of metal. “It’s a bracket.”

Jenkins throws his head back. “Well, thank God, a bracket. Now we’ve got ‘em, huh?”

I toss the bracket to the side and glare at Jenkins. “You know, I’m beginning to see why you were taken.”

Suddenly Jenkins’ cage unbolts with a loud clank and the door swings open. Jenkins pokes his head out and looks around. “Must’ve been short.” He crawls out and stretches his legs, a big smile spread across his face. “Maybe you knocked somethin’ loose.”

“I think you should get back in there, Jenkins.”

Jenkins looks like I just asked him to chew off his own foot. “What?”

“This isn’t right.”

“Don’t you wanna get out of here?” Jenkins dangles his head outside of my cage.

“Yeah, but that was too easy.” I glance back at the small door, the one where the men always come through.

“Look, I’m gonna get out of here, and I’m gonna send help, okay?” Jenkins walks over to the door. “Don’t worry.”

“No, I’m serious.” I crawl to the other side of my cage. “This might be a trap.”

“Bye, Harley.” Jenkins pushes through the door and disappears.

“Jenkins!” I yell, but he doesn’t come back.

I sit with my back against the rusted metal bars, facing the barn doors, watching the dim light slowly fade to black. There wasn’t much sense in being afraid when Jenkins was here, but now that I’m by myself the fear blooms. The fear of being alone, the fear that Dean will never find me – if he’s even looking for me. The fear that I’m going to die here.

Somewhere in the distance, Jenkins’ scream echoes through the night. It cuts off abruptly. A cold shiver runs down my spine and I know that by this time tomorrow, that’s going to be me.

The door of the empty cage next to me swings shut.

The men must have given up on bringing me food since I refused to eat the first time they fed me. I don’t even remember how long ago that was. The hunger, the thirst, the pain, the fatigue, it all makes the time pass so much more slowly. As if I had so much to do staring out at an empty barn all day.

In the dead of night the two men return. What night that is, I can’t say. When did Jenkins disappear? Last night? Two nights ago? The bolt to the cage next to me unlocks, unreasonably loud in the dead silence. My body tells me to sit up quickly and be alert, but I haven’t eaten or had water in days and my muscles haven’t been used except to be beaten on or pull on a cable.

Groggily I push myself into an upright position, but there really was no point to doing that because something hard collides with the side of my face and I hit the ground again. The two men laugh evilly.

“Bring her in,” one of them says.

The other man drags in a limp body. A pale, red-haired woman, wearing a dirty white t-shirt and green pants. The man tosses her into Jenkins’ empty cage and bolts the door. They leave.

The woman sits up and looks around, massaging her head. I don’t sit up because I don’t think my brain could handle the pressure, but I ask her, “You all right?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

There’s a pause. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to say or do so I remain quiet.

“Are you Harley Cooper?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say to the top of my cage, not caring how she knows my name.

“Your, uh, your cousin’s looking for you.”

I smile weakly, letting myself feel small bit of relief. Not too much, though, because I sense a ‘but’ coming. “Where is he?”

“I, um…I cuffed him to my car.”

Slowly I turn my head to look at her. Now I know why the green pants look familiar. Sheriff’s pants. I sigh and roll over. Dean’s close by. A pair of cuffs are nothing for him – he’ll be out of those in no time. But he’s got these men to deal with, and the cages. I don’t like those odds.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Kathleen.”

“Welcome to the party, Kathleen.”

She doesn’t respond.

I might have a concussion and sleep is probably the worst thing for me right now, but I let myself fall into oblivion anyway.

The creaking of the large wood doors wakes me up and immediately I realize I was right – going to sleep was a bad idea. My vision is fuzzy; there’s a haze around the periphery of whatever I look at. My brain throbs like it wants to burst out of my skull. I’m past feeling frightened knowing those men are returning for me. Sadly, I think I’m just ready to die.

“Ugh,” someone groans. Footsteps approach my cage and then something falls heavily in front of it. “Harley?”

I squint through the haze and I can barely believe my eyes. “Dean,” I whisper, smiling faintly.

“Are you hurt?” Dean asks. He reaches through one of the squares and holds his hand out to me. I shrug, extend my arm out weakly until he grabs hold of my hand. “Damn, it’s good to see you,” he says, smiling in relief.

“You, too,” I say earnestly. “Where’s John?”

“He’s on his way. I called him as soon as I found the place.”

“How did you get out of the cuffs?” Kathleen asks.

Dean just grins at her. “Oh, I know a trick or two.” Kathleen stares at him, confused, and I try not to laugh because I know it will hurt. “All right.” Dean examines the cages. “Oh, these locks look like they’re gonna be a bitch.”

“Well, there’s some kind of automatic control right there,” I say feebly, and point to the control panel for half a second before I have to drop my arm again.

He nods and goes over to it. “Have you seen ’em?” He flips open the panel and squints at the buttons.

“Yeah,” I say, struggling into a sitting position. “Dean, they’re just people.”

“And they jumped you?” Dean raises an eyebrow at me, the corner of his mouth pulling up into a mischievous smile. “What happened to all that macho-talk back in Colorado? You must be getting a little rusty there, kiddo.” He hits different buttons, but nothing unlocks the cages. “What do they want?”

“I don’t know. They let Jenkins go, but that was some sort of trap. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“Well, that’s the point. You know, with our usual playmates, there’s rules, there’s patterns. But with people, they’re just crazy.” Dean gives the panel a final defeated punch before walking back over to the cages.

“See anything else out there?” I ask.

“Uh, they have about a dozen junked cars hidden out back. Plates from all over, so I’m thinking when they take someone, they take their car, too. Not yours, though. It’s safe.” He kneels down and averts his eyes, looking uncomfortable. “Now that I think about it, I don’t think they had time to take it. I came out of the bar, saw the flashlight…” He shakes his head. “If I had only been a minute or so earlier–”

“Stop, Dean,” I say weakly. “You’re here now. Focus on getting me out, all right?”

He nods an affirmative and takes hold of the bars of my cage and rattles them, trying to get the bolts loose.

“Ow, Dean, stop,” I groan, gripping my head, and he does. “I’m not feeling too good.”

“Did you see a black Mustang out there?” Kathleen asks Dean abruptly. “Older model?”

“Yeah, actually, I did.”

Kathleen’s expression turns sullen.

“Your brother’s?”

Kathleen nods, and I realize her connection to the situation and why she probably offered to help Dean find me.

“I’m sorry,” Dean says quietly. “Let’s get you guys out of here, then we’ll take care of those bastards. The control panel takes a key.” He shoots me an expectant look. “Key?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“All right, I better go find it.”

He turns to leave and I feel a rush of panic inside me. I lunge for the bars of the cage, despite all my pain and discomfort, and reach out for him. “Dean,” I say desperately. “Be careful.”

“Yeah.” He touches my hand and nods before he leaves. The ray of hope that burst inside me the moment I saw Dean in the barn disappears with him as he walks out the door.

I know it’s illogical to think that Dean would find the key to the cages almost immediately, but the longer he’s gone the more I fear he’s never coming back. I have no concept of real time being trapped in the cage inside this abhorrent barn, but I know that Dean’s been gone for a long, long time.

Suddenly the door bursts open. I turn to face it, fervently expecting Dean, only to find one of the men stalking over. He lacks the poncho, dressed in a ratty button-up shirt and holey jeans instead, and carries a shotgun. He inserts the key into the panel and twists it. My cage unlocks.

“What are you doing?” I ask, scooting to the back of the cage as the man gets closer. My hand comes across the bracket mixed in with the hay and I grab it, not entirely sure why. The man raises his gun and aims it at me. I get a sickening feeling in my stomach.

“Hey!” Kathleen shouts.

The man is easily distracted; he turns away for half a second. I take this moment to gather whatever energy I have inside of me – which isn’t much – and leap out of my cage, tackling the man to the ground. I honestly think only two things allowed me to succeed at this: the thought of seeing Dean again, and the fact that the man’s attention wasn’t completely on me so he was caught off-balance when I collided with him.

I land on top of the man on the floor and wrestle for the shotgun. We struggle with until the man wises up and gives a good yank. The gun escapes me, but the buckshot doesn’t. He shoves the barrel into my thigh and the gun goes off. I scream and fall to the side, clutching my leg.

I’ve never been shot before. The pain is unbearable, pulsing from the large wound and radiating up to the rest of my body. Blood gushes from the side of my thigh and my hands do little to deter the flow.

The man attempts to get up and I know I can’t have him on his feet or else I lose my advantage. I roll over onto my knees, try to ignore the searing pain in my right leg, and jump back on top of the man and yank the gun out of his stunned hands. He lies there, petrified, but I muster up all of the anger and pain inside me and channel it into the action of smashing the gun into the man’s face. Three times. Now he lays unconscious. I stand up and hobble on one leg.

I’m angry. That anger fights for the space the pain from the shotgun wound has on me, and I want to let the anger take hold. I raise the gun, aim it at my captor, and feel a rush of satisfaction in the anticipation he will experience the same pain I’m in once I pull the trigger.

The gun jams.

I stare at the useless hunk of metal, appalled, and resist the urge to chuck it across the room. I might need it as a crutch. I brace it against the floor as I hobble over to the panel to open Kathleen’s cage.

“Can you help me lock the guy up?” I ask Kathleen when she is on her feet. “I can’t stand.”

“Sure.” She single-handedly manhandles the unconscious hillbilly into my vacant cage and slams the door shut. I turn the key and the cage locks itself.

My jeans are soaked with blood and I’m even more lightheaded now than I was before. I lean against the pole and take off my plaid over-shirt and rip it into pieces. I fashion a makeshift tourniquet around my groin area and wrap the wound with the remaining strips and sleeves, grimacing at the pain but forbidding myself to cry out.

From somewhere inside the house, a loud, deep voice shouts out, “Lee!” I can’t tell if that’s Dean calling for me or the other man calling for his partner. I assume that it’s the latter, going by the hint of a hillbilly accent. And if Lee is the man I just knocked unconscious and Kathleen then locked up in a cage, I’m sure Lee’s family will come looking for him when he doesn’t answer.

A metal pipe catches my eye. I see it a few feet away from me, next to an empty stall filled with hay. I get on all fours and inch my way over to it. Once I’ve gotten hold of the pipe, I go back to the control panel and whack it until sparks fly and the lights cut out. Perfect.

“Lee? Where are ya? Lee!” The voices get closer.

“We need to hide,” Kathleen says. She helps support me into the shadows at the edges of the barn and leaves me behind stacks of hay before going off to find another hiding place.

Two men barge into the room, mad and wild-eyed. They came in moments after Kathleen left me; I hope she had enough time to find somewhere safe. I peek around the hay, staying low to the ground, but it wouldn’t matter. It’s hard to see anything in the dimness. But the men do find Lee locked in my cage, and that draws an anguished growl from one of them.

“Damn it! Jared, get the lights!” the older man orders the younger. I hear the clicking of the light switch but the lights don’t come on.

“They must have blown the fuses, Pa,” Jared says.

The older man, Pa, walks right past the stacks of hay bales that provide my cover and climbs a ladder to my left, leading up to the balcony of the barn. If the man really is the younger men’s father, that makes this family affair all the more sickening.

I don’t know where Kathleen disappeared to, but several shots ring out from the opposite side of the barn. With Pa occupied on the second level, I limp across the dirty floor, using the shotgun as a crutch again, to see what the commotion is.

Kathleen and Jared, the other son, come crashing into the middle of the floor in a heap. Jared pistol-whips Kathleen in the jaw and she crumples to the side, giving Jared a chance to get to his feet.

“You stupid bitch,” he laughs evilly, raising his gun.

“Hey!” I shout. _Yeah, that’s smart_ , I think. Shout at the man who has a gun in his hand!

Jared turns around, gun still poised to shoot, and fires when he sees me. I miraculously escape the bullet by slamming myself against the metal cages. I don’t want to add two gunshot wounds in one evening to my repertoire.

“Pa!” Jared yells.

I may have dodged the bullet, but Pa wasn’t so lucky. The hillbilly falls to his knees, clutching his midsection. He must have seen me making my way to the other side of the barn and climbed back down to the first level, finding himself in the line of fire when I jumped out of the way. Despite just having shot his father, Jared doesn’t hesitate. He cocks the gun and returns his aim to Kathleen, who still lies helpless on the floor.

I don’t know what I can do now. Jared won’t fall for me calling out again. I have a jammed shotgun in my hands. Only useful at close-range at this point. What the hell.

As fast as I can, which isn’t fast at all since blood is now trailing behind me from the wound in my leg and I can actually see stars in front of my eyes, I stumble over behind Jared and jam the butt of the shotgun into the back of his head with all of my strength. I feel and hear the crack of his skull as the gun makes contact, and even after he’s on the ground, the memory of the crack is etched in my brain and hands. I shiver. I honestly didn’t know I had that much strength left in me.

Kathleen gets to her feet and drags the unconscious Jared into her empty cage. She has to lock the bolt by hand since I destroyed the control panel, so hopefully if Jared comes to he doesn’t figure out how to unlock his own cage.

Jared’s gun lies forgotten on the floor next to a small pool of his blood from the head injury I inflicted on him. Kathleen picks it up and makes her way over to Pa, who begins to stir despite the large bullet wound to his abdomen.

She points the gun at him, then tells me, “I’ll watch this one. You go ahead.”

I can’t move.

“Go on.”

I take one last look at Kathleen and Pa, then slowly make my way to the small door, listening to their conversation.

“You hurt my family. I’m gonna bleed you, bitch.”

“You killed my brother,” Kathleen says in a shaky voice that is unmistakably choking back tears.

“Your brother?” Pa laughs cruelly. “Now I see.”

“Just tell me why.”

“Because it’s fun.” Pa cackles. The door swings shut but I can still hear his cackle become a strained gurgle as the gun is fired.

The house is in no better condition than the barn. A thick layer of dust covers every inch of worn down furniture, tattered drapes, wood floor with chunks missing. The windows are so dirty I can’t see outside. Despite my best efforts to avoid the disgusting floor, I end up on it because I can’t hold myself up any longer. I’ve lost too much blood.

“Dean,” I call out. My voice is so faint I doubt he heard me, but there’s a loud crash from the next room and Dean appears. His face drains of color as soon as he sees me. He runs over, yelling for John.

“Harley,” he says, skidding to a stop on his knees in front of me. “Oh, fuck.” He scoops me up and carries me out of the house, still shouting for John. “We need to get her out of here!” he orders. Without waiting, he heads down the rotting porch and over to the Impala, which waits like a glorious black chariot to take me away.

“Wait, where’s the little girl that attacked you?” I hear John ask.

“I locked her in a closet. Let’s go!”

I faintly recall being in Dean’s arms in the backseat of the Impala as John drives away. I’m so far gone there’s no more pain, no sensation in my body anymore before I black out.

I don’t know where I am. I feel my body moving but I’m not the one moving it. There are voices around me, men’s voices. This frightens me, because I think I’m back in the cage, about to be tortured again by Pa and Jared and Lee, those crazy-ass hillbillies. I squirm around, causing a burning pain in the lower half of my body.

“Shh, Harley,” someone says. I won’t look, but I know that voice. So familiar, so comforting. “You’re safe now.”

“Bring her over here,” another man says. This voice confuses me. It’s familiar, but one I haven’t heard in a very long time.

Then, I’m steady on something soft and lumpy. Since I haven’t fully woken up, it doesn’t take much for me to turn my head to the side and slip into unconsciousness again.

My eyes slowly flutter open. A bright light flooding in through old, tall paned windows blinds me. The windows have long, thick, floor-length yellow-and-brown plaid drapes hanging on them, but they’re pulled open, and the wispy faded red mosquito netting does nothing to block the sun. There’s a tree right outside, and beyond that, in the back yard, old cars stacked on top of each other in neat piles. We aren’t in a motel, that’s for sure, even though the atrocious interior décor struggles to tell me otherwise.

I groan and turn my head. My eyes widen. I’m not sure what’s more surprising: the amount of books stuffed into the room – on multiple old bookshelves along the walls, piled on the antique desk in front of a stone fireplace, simply arranged around the large rug that covers most of the hardwood floor that looks like it hasn’t been waxed in decades – or that Dean sits beside the worn out red couch, his head on my stomach and the rest of him sort of just hanging off the side. He doesn’t look all that comfortable.

But seeing him there makes my chest swell with delight and my heart starts to beat a little faster. I gingerly run my hand through his hair.

Dean gives a snort before he stirs and opens his eyes. The relief and joy on his face when he sees me is unmistakable. “Harley.” He takes my face gently in his large hands and kisses my forehead. His warm lips linger for a moment before he pulls away.

“Hi,” I say weakly. My voice is dry and scratchy. I cough a few times to clear it up. Dean scrambles to the desk and grabs a glass of water and helps me take a drink. I’d object to the assistance, but I’m shocked to find that it’s hard for me to lift my arm, let alone hold the glass.

“Never do that again,” Dean says sternly.

“Do what?”

“Go missing like that.”

I stare at Dean, long and hard, and then I laugh. It hurts my throat but I do it anyway. Dean narrows his eyes.

“You were worried about me,” I croak, and start coughing again.

“All I’m saying is, you vanish like that again, I’m not looking for you,” Dean grumbles. He takes the glass and puts it back on the table so he doesn’t have to look at me.

“Sure, you won’t.”

“I’m not!”

I laugh lightly. Then I remember something from that madhouse. “So, you got sidelined by a little girl, huh?”

“Oh, shut up,” Dean says. “You don’t know the half of it. That little bitch was crazy.”

“Just saying, you’re getting a little rusty there, kiddo,” I say with a shrug.

Dean chuckles and lowers his head, then looks back up at me. “Shut up,” he says half-heartedly, a grin still on his face.

“How long was I out?” I ask.

“Since we’ve been here?” Dean looks around the room. “Two days.”

Everything that happened continues to come back to me in pieces. The biker bar in Minnesota, getting taken, being trapped in the cages. Escaping, barely. But I don’t know how much time has passed since that happened. Dean doesn’t look all that eager to tell me. I struggle to sit up a little higher.

“Dean,” I say. “How long has it been since…they took me?”

Dean bites his lip. He faces me, but his eyes are pointed at my ear. “Six days.” His head drops and he takes my hands in his.

My head falls back on the pillow and I stare at the ceiling, at the giant Devil’s Trap painted on the wood. “Wow,” I say, because that’s all I can think to say, until I try to break the tension with some light humor. “That’s one helluva way to spend a birthday, huh?”

Dean sighs and hangs his head. “Harley, I’m s–”

“No,” I say, cutting him off. “You don’t have to apologize. You got me out of that place. That’s more than I can ask for.”

He reaches over and tucks a piece of my hair behind my ear, then holds his hand to my cheek. His eyes are turning glassy, like they would be filling with tears if he didn’t have the willpower to hold them back.

“I honestly didn’t think you were going to make it,” he whispers.

I look at him quizzically. “What do you mean?”

Slowly, Dean pulls away the thick pile of blankets. Only now do I realize I’m sweating under them, but I must have been shivering before. I look down at myself and gasp. My right leg is wrapped mid-thigh in gauzy bandages, and whatever isn’t covered in bandages is a sickly blackish-purple color, all the way down past my knee. I’m dressed a pair of soft shorts. Dean had to have changed me because I was wearing jeans before. I try to move my leg but I can’t. I grit my teeth, determined to fight back a cry of pain.

“No, don’t move,” Dean says. He guides me back down again and covers me with only one blanket this time. “Bobby fixed you up.”

“Oh,” I say, looking around the room again. It all clicks into place. I haven’t been here in forever. 

Dean shakes his head.

“What?” I ask.

“My dad,” he says angrily. “I can’t believe he left you that night. If he had just waited with you instead of taking off, none of this would have happened.”

“You can’t blame your dad, Dean,” I say. I don’t mention that if he would have let me leave them in Copper Harbor like I had wanted, I’d have never gone to Minnesota and been captured, either. But that seems trivial and, frankly, it’s a low blow. “I kind of got the feeling that those people get what they want, anyway. It might not have mattered if John was there or not.”

“They hunt people,” Dean says. “That family. The _Benders_. They capture and hunt people for sport. A couple people a year, so they don’t draw suspicion.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “I said it before and I’ll say it again. Demons I get. People are crazy.”

“But you got them. You found them and took care of them.”

“Not before they did this,” Dean says, indicating me. “You did great, Harley. Kathleen told me what you did, even after you were shot.”

My stomach churns. I fight with the thought that it’s just hunger when I know it’s nerves. Nerves over what I think about saying. I say it anyway. “I knew I had to do it if I wanted to see you again. That’s the only thing that got me through it.”

“You have no idea how hard it was for me trying to find you. There was absolutely nothing to go on. We came across that house by accident.” Dean moves closer to me, his eyes brimming with tears. He takes a deep breath and says, “I don’t know what I would’ve done if I’d lost you.”

I reach out, even though it hurts, and touch the Samulet hanging in front of his black t-shirt. Then I run my hand up his chest and rest it on the back of his neck, feeling the tiny hairs there. He leans in and presses his lips softly on mine. It’s not like any kiss we’ve had yet. It’s slow, gentle. He runs his hands through my hair and holds on to me as the kiss builds, not faster, just deeper, as if we’re afraid that this is the last kiss we will ever have.

When he pulls away my cheeks are wet. I can’t tell if the tears are mine or his. He tenderly shifts me to the side so he can sit down, his arms wrapped around me. I feel the coolness of the silver ring on his right hand brush against my skin.

I bury my face in his chest, and he strokes my hair. I hold on to him and tell myself I never want to let him go.

Part of me wants to fall asleep again but I know I need to eat something. It’s honestly a miracle that I’m still alive. With no food or water in a week and losing the amount of blood I did, I should really be dead.

The back door opens and Bobby Singer and John turn the corner, entering the room from behind the opposite side of the desk. John sits down in an armchair across the room while Bobby walks over to the couch.

“Good, you’re awake,” Bobby says in his gravelly voice. He wears jeans and muddy boots. A red shirt and blue plaid button up under a tan hunting jacket with fur around the collar. A faded blue ball-cap that doesn’t match. I haven’t seen Bobby in anything different, ever. Maybe the color of the shirts and hat changes, but that’s about it.

“Hey, Bobby,” I say, smiling up at him. “Good to see you.”

He just stares at me. Bobby is older than John. His mustache is still brown but the rest of his facial hair is more gray, as is the hair that sticks out from under his hat.

“I don’t see you in three years, then Dean just shows up on my doorstep with you half dead?” he says grumpily. He folds his arms over his chest, glares at me for a moment until I start to feel uncomfortable. Then he relaxes. “It’s good to see you too, kid. Don’t ever scare me like that again.” He nods to Dean. “Get her somethin’ to eat. I need to check the stitches.”

Dean gets up, gently moving me to the side, but I grab his arm. He touches my cheek gently. “I’ll be right back.” He kisses the top of my head and walks off into the kitchen. Bobby’s house has two rooms on the first floor: the library, where we are right now, and the kitchen.

I move back the blanket, only exposing my right leg. Bobby unwraps the bandages and I see the extent of the damage from the bullets. I’m glad I haven’t eaten anything because if I had, I’d be seeing it again. My thigh is swollen, barely held together by threads of black stitches zigzagged along the side of it. The shotgun rounds shredded down to the muscle, and Bobby did his best to sew it all back together into a sickly mound of black and green flesh.

“Hmm,” Bobby mutters. He retrieves a tray of jars, clean bandages and cotton balls from the desk and pulls up a chair next to me. He dips a cotton ball into a thin brown liquid and looks me square in the eye. “I need to clean it. This is gonna hurt.”

I nod and grip the edges of the couch. I grind my teeth together but it doesn’t do much good. As soon as the cotton ball touches my leg a blinding pain courses through my body and I scream. It’s a good thing that I can’t move my leg, or else I would have kicked Bobby.

Dean rushes into the room carrying a butter knife and a slice of bread. Without looking up from essentially burning my leg off, Bobby says, “She’s fine. Go back to the kitchen.”

“I’m fine, Dean,” I say in a strained voice that clearly says I’m not fine.

Dean hesitantly leaves.

Bobby finishes with the brown liquid and slathers on a white cream that counteracts the burning sensation like magic. It’s as if my leg was dipped into a pond of cool water. I let out a long breath of air and my muscles relax. Bobby wraps my thigh in fresh bandages and covers me with the blanket.

“Good news, there’s no infection.” Bobby screws the lids back on the jars and puts the tray on the table. “Bad news is, it’s too soon to see if it’s healin’. At least the stitches are holdin’.”

“Thanks, Bobby,” I say.

My eyes drift over to John, sitting silently in the armchair. I think about what Dean said, about how this might not have happened if John had just waited, and I wonder if John feels somewhat responsible for this.

Dean comes back into the library carrying a plate with a sandwich on it. “Soup probably would be better, but Bobby’s supplies consist of meat and beer.”

I smile. “It’s okay. Thank you.”

“We’ll leave you two,” John says. He can’t meet my eyes. “Glad you’re feeling better.” He leaves the way he came in and Bobby follows.

It’s a struggle to eat the sandwich. Dean’s right, soup probably would be better, but I can’t complain. I manage to hold down half the sandwich and the rest of the water. Once I’ve finished, Dean puts the plate and empty glass on the desk and resumes his place on the couch to hold me.

“I’m so tired but I don’t want to sleep,” I say. I hold the Samulet in my hand and run my thumb back and forth over it.

“You need to rest,” Dean says.

“Sleep and rest are different. I can rest and still talk to you.”

Dean kisses the top of my hair again and rests his cheek on my head. He gives me a little squeeze. Sadly I think, it took me disappearing for him to realize that he didn’t want to lose me. For him to admit to himself what I admitted to myself back in Copper Harbor.

“So, what happened?” I ask. “With the Benders.”

“Is that really what you want to talk about right now?” he mutters into my hair.

“I guess not,” I say dejectedly.

Dean sighs. “They’re disgusting people, Harley. Not the kind of job I want to remember. They had a wall full of Polaroids of the two brothers standing next to dead bodies. Standing with their kills. It was sick. And then, they had shelves full of jars and bottles with body parts in them.” He shudders. “Even the daughter was a violent…creature. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen.”

“I can’t believe we made it out of there,” I say quietly.

“For a moment I thought we weren’t. Dad was still on his way. I knew he wasn’t going to get there in time. They had knocked me out, tied me to a chair. They wanted to hunt me. Of course, I knew if I got loose out there I’d kick their asses.”

“Of course,” I say, patting his chest.

“They wanted to hunt you and Kathleen, too,” Dean says darkly. “They thought it would be funny if they made me watch, and even funnier if they made me choose who went first.”

My stomach twists into a knot. “Did you choose?”

“I had to.” Dean looks away and that’s when I realize, he chose me. I remember Lee coming for me with the shotgun, ready to fire.

“Oh, my God,” I whisper.

“They said they were going to let you go in the woods. Give you a chance. I knew if you were free you could fight your way out. I didn’t know they were just going to shoot you.” Dean’s face hardens. “I heard that shot go off and I swear, I was ready to rip all their heads off. But you pulled through.”

I don’t say anything. I just lay my head on his chest. He holds me a little tighter. I can hear his heart beating, strong and steady, and I find comfort knowing that I am finally safe.

Dean and I stay at Bobby’s for five months while my leg heals. John and Bobby go out on a hunt every so often, and while I can tell Dean itches to get back out there, he won’t leave me. He helps me with everything. For the first two weeks I can’t even move my leg. Dean had cleaned me with warm rags while I was unconscious, but I was in desperate need of a real shower. He had to carry me to the downstairs bathroom and help me undress, help me stand while I cleaned myself.

I pass the days until Thanksgiving reading from the endless books in Bobby’s library or watching TV on an ancient set Dean put up in front of the couch. Bobby dug out dusty old board games from the attic that Sam, Dean and I used to play when we were kids and occasionally Dean and I would play with those, too.

A week before Thanksgiving I try walking, despite Bobby and Dean’s protests. With the holidays coming up, I need something to distract me. Just because they don’t celebrate doesn’t mean I never used to with my dad. And now he’s gone. Focusing on regaining the normal function of my legs helps keep my mind off him.

The muscles in my left leg haven’t been used in a month and are barely strong enough to hold me. The shredded muscle of my right thigh can’t hold my weight, either. John and Bobby brought back crutches after one of their hunts. I use these after Dean helps me stand. It takes a while to get used to them, but after two days I manage.

We get a white Christmas at Bobby’s this year. Apart from the Christmas music playing through the staticy old radio and the red and green tinsel above the fireplace that I begged Dean to go out and get, you can’t really tell it’s Christmas at all. There’s no tree. Our Christmas dinner isn’t fancy. Pizza and beer for the boys, at high request from Dean and Bobby, and a can of beef stew for me. I couldn’t eat anything richer, anyway. Even though it’s been two months, I can’t manage more than a few spoonfuls of anything without getting sick.

Dean and I sit on the couch in the library, snuggled up together, reading from one of Bobby’s books. It’s large and old and the pages crack if you don’t turn them properly. John and Bobby sit in the armchairs, drinking beer, talking and laughing. There’s a fire crackling happily in the fireplace. It’s warm, cozy. It’s the closest I’ve felt to home in a long time, and the first time I’ve felt truly happy since my dad died.

By March my leg is fully healed. Now that I jog, Dean won’t come outside with me anymore. He despises running, and anything healthy, for that matter. Every day I go outside and jog slowly around Bobby’s salvage yard. I get faster, and I’m proud of myself, considering that in early January I could barely walk around the house. That made things kind of difficult when I wanted to really celebrate Dean’s birthday. We had to kind of settle for just lying in bed and kissing instead of doing what I actually had planned.

My leg may be healed enough for me to run around again, but the scar is unbearably unattractive. It spreads over half of my upper leg and makes my once smooth skin a wrinkled, lumpy lesion. It was swollen and sore when it had the stitches in, but after Bobby took those out and the muscles and skin closed completely, it’s like they sunk into my leg, leaving a small dip. I can’t stand to look at it and I get grossed out when I accidentally touch it. Dean knows how I feel about it and constantly lets me know that it doesn’t matter to him. On our nights alone in bed, he always kisses the scar gently before he kisses me.


	7. The Woman in White

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We all know how it works now. John goes AWOL, and Harley and Dean have no choice but to turn to Sam. 'Why can't Harley and Dean look for John by themselves?' you ask. 'There's two of them, there really isn't a need for Sam. Sam wouldn't know anything more than them, he hasn't seen John in years. So much of this fic is basically useless.' Well, to answer your question, I do not gawd damn know. lol. But Sam is vital to the story, and his friendship with Harley is something I cherish. So there. (In January 2021 I came up with the idea that "Sam is family and this is a family affair". Whatever.)
> 
> I had to expedite the timeline and had John discover the yellow-eyed demon a few years earlier. It worked out better that way, and I haven't come across a speed bump. Yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For being this is one of the chapters I've read and re-read dozens of times, there sure was a lot of grammatical mistakes before this final edit haha.  
> I don't know if I've said this before, but if there's anything in my story you find, like...incorrect, or doesn't make sense, or just sounds completely fucking stupid, PLEASE let me know. lol.

It’s been two years since I was taken captive by the Benders. Dean, John and I left Bobby Singer’s house at the end of March in 2004 to resume hunting. It was slow-going for me at first. I was constantly afraid that my leg would give out when Dean or John was depending on me. I stayed back doing most of the research, interviewing, and surveillance while John and Dean took care of the hard labor so I could focus on rebuilding the muscle mass in my leg.

More often than I’d like to admit, I woke up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat and screaming, having been consumed by yet another nightmare of being trapped in the cage. Every single night that happened, Dean was always there, ready to calm me down and hold me until I was able to go back to sleep. Even now, a couple years after the incident, nightmares will plague me every so often. I probably wouldn’t be able to survive if it wasn’t for Dean.

John never mentions the things going on between Dean and I. He knows something’s there but he refuses to talk about it. That actually makes it easier for Dean and I to put our feelings aside while we’re working. After a job is done and we get time to ourselves, though, it’s as if we haven’t seen each other in months.

In August of 2005 John’s behavior starts to change. Dean doesn’t seem to notice so I don’t mention it, but I continue to pay attention. When we make plans to meet somewhere, John sometimes takes hours if not an entire day to catch up to us. He spends all of his free time locked in his separate motel room, and he never lets Dean or I inside if we have to talk to him. He never takes phone calls in front of us. All I can think is, he’s working on something shady and I hope it doesn’t get the rest of us hurt.

When late October rolls around, John tells us that he needs to take care of some business. A hunting trip that he needs to handle alone, and he’ll be back by the end of the week. Dean doesn’t question him, as usual. I definitely think something is going on, but I know it’s not my place to interrogate him.

We split up in Pennsylvania. John drives away in a 1983 GMC Sierra. As Dean and I watch him leave, there’s a sinking feeling in my stomach that we’re not going to see him again for a long time. 

It’s odd that I was right about that. At the end of the week, John hasn’t made contact. Dean doesn’t worry yet, thinking he’ll give John a day or two in case the job ran long. Another week later, there’s still no word, so I call Bobby. Ask him if he knows what John was working on or where he could be. Bobby has no idea. That, or he can’t or won’t tell me. Dean gets in touch with a few of John’s old contacts, but none of them has heard from John in a while.

Maybe John’s been so secretive because he’s found something about the demon that killed his wife. There’s no way I could mention that to Dean for fear he’d follow in his father’s obsessive footsteps. Not that I’d ever hold him back from trying to hunt down that particular demon and end the Winchester vendetta, we just need to keep a level head so we can find John.

On the third week after John said he’d be back, Dean and I sit in a coffee shop in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Dean hangs up the phone on yet another dead-end lead. I sip on my coffee, watch the customers in the shop that lead such mundane lives and think, _If they only knew the kind of lives_ we _lead…_

After a few moments of mindless wondering, I say aloud, “At what point do we consider John missing?”

Dean shoots me a look. Shakes his head. “I don’t know. Dad’s never disappeared like this before.”

I turn on my stool to face him. “Dean, you tried to make contact with John for weeks after our first hunt together, and he never picked up the phone. What makes this any different?”

He fiddles with an empty sugar packet. “He said he would call. That’s the difference.” He balls up the packet and tosses it aside. “We’ve called everyone we could possibly go to for help. I’m at a loss here, Harley.”

There’s someone we haven’t called. I’ve been avoiding bringing it up until we had absolutely run out of all other options, and I think now we’ve gotten to that point. “There’s still one person out there you haven’t thought of,” I say slowly. I watch his face, not entirely sure how he’ll react.

Just then, Dean’s phone rings. Talk about saved-by-the-bell. Dean answers it. There’s no one on the other end of the blocked call. “That’s weird. I have a voicemail.” He scrunches his brows together. “When did I get a call other than now?” He calls his voicemail and listens. His eyes widen as the message plays. He hits a button and hands the phone to me.

It’s John. Wherever he called from, he had terrible reception. The voicemail is staticy and the signal keeps cutting out. “Dean…something big – happening…I – try and figure out what’s g – It may – Be very careful…We’re all in danger.”

“What was in the background?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Dean says. “Sounds like EVP. I need your laptop.”

We work straight from the trunk of the Impala. Dean plugs the phone into the laptop and copies the voicemail into an audio file. While he messes with that, I notice a manila folder tucked away under a duffel bag. I open it and flip through the pages inside. It’s copies of articles from the _Jericho Herald_ , dating back to the early nineties.

“Dean, check this out,” I say, handing him the folder. “How did we miss this?”

He scans the titles in the articles. “Did Dad leave this for us?”

“Why would he be so secretive about where he was going but leave clues to his location?”

“He said something was dangerous,” Dean says, tapping his lip. “Maybe he didn’t want to get us involved unless it was absolutely necessary.” Dean stares at me, eyes narrowed. “Unless he was in serious trouble.”

The laptop beeps twice. Dean presses a button, releasing a woman’s voice from the tiny speakers.

“ _I can never go home_ …”

“That’s not ominous,” I mutter.

Dean snorts. “Right?” He connects a cord from my laptop to a tape recorder. He puts the original voicemail and the woman’s words on it, then shuts the laptop down.

“Who haven’t I thought of?” he says suddenly. “To call for help?” He raises an eyebrow in anticipation.

I sigh. “Sam. We could call Sam.”

He almost laughs. “You don’t think I’ve thought of that?” Dean grinds his teeth, working the muscles in his jaw. I can practically see the gears turning in his head, running over the pros and cons of calling up his little brother. He shakes his head. “No. If we call Sam he won’t help us.”

“You don’t know that, Dean.”

“I do know that,” Dean snaps. He takes a deep breath, lets it out in a long stream through his nose. In a calmer voice, he says, “I haven’t seen Sam in years. Sam hasn’t seen _Dad_ in years. How could he possibly help us?”

I shrug. “He’s another body, another pair of eyes. We could cover more ground.”

Dean shuts the trunk and leans against it. He folds his arms, looks at me with a frown, looks out at nothing. “He won’t help us if we _call_. We gotta go to Stanford.”

The 3,000 mile drive to Stanford University in California is the longest trip we’ve had together. Dean can’t drive straight through even though I know he wants to. I manage to convince him to trade off driving every so often and we can sleep in shifts.

The closer we get to California the harder it becomes to determine the difference between Dean’s worries over his dad and his nerves about seeing Sam again after four years. He bangs the steering wheel with a little too much force while jamming out to songs, jumping at any little noise that could be a phone ringing or a text message. I wish there was something I could say to him but I think this is something he has to work out on his own.

I was hoping that the long journey to Stanford would give John a chance to call Dean or myself with some better news than the voicemail he left, but it’s clear that’s not going to happen when we roll up to an apartment complex off the main campus in the dead of night a few days later.

“You wanna come up?” Dean asks me.

“No. But I will because my butt is sore from sitting so long.”

“All right, let’s go.”

“How do you know which apartment is his?”

“Called the super while you were asleep. Pretended to be Sam, said I locked myself out.” Dean shrugs. “Say the right things in the right way, people will let things slip.”

We park in the alley between two buildings. A short stairwell leads down to a gated door, which is thankfully unlocked. Behind this door is a back entrance to the apartments. We climb the stairs to the third floor and walk to a window halfway down the building. Dean picks the lock and shoves the wooden frame up. It’s old, like it hasn’t been opened in years, and makes a lot of noise. He looks at me, brows pulled together, and says, “ _Shh_.” I laugh inaudibly and hit him on the shoulder.

We climb through the window and stalk silently through the apartment. It’s dark, but what did I expect. Sam’s probably asleep at two o’clock in the morning. I look around, letting my eyes adjust. Dean confidently makes his way through the small apartment. I blink a few times and see a shadow across the next room. The shadow is long and I can make out shaggy hair.

The shadow lunges forward, followed by a loud thud. I hurry through the strings of beads in the doorway and watch as the two shadows fight. My eyes adjust to the darkness a little better but I really couldn’t tell the difference if I didn’t know that Dean was shorter and wearing an oversized jacket and by process of elimination figuring the tall giant was Sam.

Dean grabs Sam’s arm, swings him around and shoves him. Sam is taken aback because a small ray of light from the moon illuminates Dean’s face for half a second. Dean takes this chance to elbow Sam in the face, and Sam retaliates with a roundhouse kick to Dean’s head. Dean ducks just in time and makes another swing at Sam, but he blocks it. Dean runs forward and knocks him down, pinning him to the floor.

“Whoa, easy, tiger,” Dean says, grinning.

“Dean?” Sam says, breathing hard. Dean just laughs. “You scared the crap out of me!”

“That’s ’cause you’re out of practice.”

Sam grabs Dean’s arm, yanks him around and slams him into the floor.

“Or not,” Dean grunts. “Get off me.”

Sam rolls to his feet and pulls Dean up. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Well, I _was_ looking for a beer.”

“What the hell are you doing _here?”_ Sam says again, with more force.

Dean takes a deep breath and shrugs. “Okay, all right. We gotta talk.”

“Uh, the phone?”

“If I’d have called, would you have picked up?”

The light flicks on. The three of us turn in unison to look across the room. A tall, thin woman with long, curly blonde hair stands in the doorway in nothing but tiny pink boy shorts and a cropped Smurfs shirt.

“Sam?” she says, looking quizzically at Dean and then over at me.

“Jess, hey,” Sam says awkwardly. “Dean, this is my girlfriend, Jessica.”

“Wait, your brother, Dean?” She smiles and Dean looks at her appreciatively.

“Oh, I love the Smurfs,” Dean says, grinning and walking closer. “You know, I gotta tell you, you are completely out of my brother’s league.”

“Just let me put something on,” Jess says uncomfortably.

Sam watches Dean with a stony expression. The feeling is mutual. I clear my throat, not at all liking where this is going. Sam’s head whips around and his eyes widen. He clearly wasn’t expecting anyone else to be here.

Sam stares at me for a long moment. “Harley?”

“Heya, Sam,” I say shyly, giving a little wave. “Long time, no see, huh?”

“Oh, my God,” he says with a wide smile. He crosses the room in two strides, his legs are so long, and embraces me in a hug so tight I feel like my lungs are being crushed. It’s probably a normal hug to him, but he’s got bear arms. “It’s good to see you.”

“You, too,” I say, patting his back. “But Sam, I can’t breathe.”

“Oh, sorry.” He releases me.

“Sam?” Jessica raises one eyebrow. “Who’s this?”

“Oh.” Sam grins like a child and stands back with his arm still around my shoulders. He can’t see through his excitement that his actions are bothering his girlfriend. “This is Harley. I told you about her. We practically grew up together.” Sam looks down at me, squeezes my shoulder. “Last time I saw you I was what, nine? Ten?”

“And about five feet shorter,” I say with a choked laugh. Sam is huge now. I look over at Jessica. “Hey,” I say to her. She just smiles with her lips pressed tightly together. I wiggle out from under Sam’s heavy arm.

Dean still stares at Jessica in wonder. “Anyway, I gotta borrow your boyfriend here, talk about some private family business. But, uh, nice meeting you.”

“No.” Sam leaves my side and walks to Jessica, wraps his arm around her waist. She seems slightly placated now. “No. Whatever you want to say, you can say it in front of her.”

Dean glances at me. I shrug. “Okay,” he says, then looks Sam straight on. “Um, Dad hasn’t been home in a few days.”

Sam scoffs. “So he’s working overtime on a _Miller Time_ shift. He’ll stumble back in sooner or later.”

Dean ducks his head, his hands on his hips. He looks back up, this time staring Sam down. “Dad’s on a _hunting_ trip. And he hasn’t been home in a few days.”

Curiosity burns in Jessica's eyes, but Sam's expression doesn't change while he takes in this information. “Jess, excuse us. We have to go outside.”

Sam goes to his room and comes back wearing jeans and shoes that look twice the size of mine. He pulls on a faded green hoodie and the three of us head downstairs, using the front door this time, but we circle back to the gated door in the basement. Sam trails behind us, snapping at Dean the entire time.

“I mean, come on,” he says. “You can’t just break in, middle of the night, and expect me to hit the road with you guys!”

“You’re not hearing me, Sammy. Dad’s missing. I need you to help us find him.”

“You remember the poltergeist in Amherst? Or the Devil’s Gates in Clifton?” Sam circles a corner on the stairs. “He was missing then, too. He’s always missing, and he’s always fine.”

Dean stops and rounds on Sam, making Sam stop in his tracks. I wait by the door. This is their fight.

“Not for this long,” Dean says. “Now are you gonna come with us or not?”

Sam looks over at me, then back at Dean. “I’m not.”

“Why not?”

“I swore I was done hunting. For good.”

“Come on,” Dean says, rolling his eyes. “It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t that bad.” He starts to walk again and Sam follows.

“Yeah? When I told Dad I was scared of the thing in my closet, he gave me a .45.”

Dean stops at the door next to me. “Well, what was he supposed to do?”

“I was nine years old!” Sam shakes his head in disbelief. “He was supposed to say ‘Don’t be afraid of the dark’.”

“‘Don’t be afraid of the dark’?” Dean mocks. “Are you kidding me? Of course you should be afraid of the dark! You know what’s out there.”

“Yeah, I know. But still.” Sam gets quiet, his face growing sad in the shadows. As big as he is, I still forget that he’s four years younger than Dean and I. “You think Mom would have wanted this for us?”

Dean rolls his eyes again and slams the door open. I stand back and let Sam pass, giving him a warning look. Sam tries a different approach as he chases after Dean across the alley. “The weapon training, and melting the silver into bullets? Man, Dean, we were raised like warriors.”

“So what are you going to do?” Dean snaps at him. “You’re just going to live some normal, apple pie life? Is that it?”

“No. Not normal. Safe.”

“And that’s why you ran away?” Dean storms over to the Impala, where I now stand. His eyes meet mine and I see, for a fleeting moment, the pain he feels. Of course he misses Sam, and it hurts him that he has to fight this hard to get his help.

“I was just going to college,” Sam says. “It was Dad who said if I was going to go I should stay gone. And that’s what I’m doing.”

Dean turns to face his brother. “Yeah, well, Dad’s in real trouble right now. If he’s not dead already. I can feel it.” Sam stays silent, his eyes finding the floor. “I can’t do this alone.”

“Yes, you can,” Sam says. He looks over at me. I look away quickly, so he doesn’t bring up the, ‘You’re not alone, you have Harley’ card.

“Yeah, well, I don’t want to,” Dean grumbles.

“You have Harley,” Sam says anyway.

“Really, Sam?” I sigh. “We need your help.”

Sam sighs and looks at the ground, kicking it with his shoe. Then he looks up. “What was he hunting?”

Dean’s demeanor does a total one-eighty. His face brightens and he leaps over to the Impala’s trunk and opens the arsenal in the spare tire compartment. He props it up with a shotgun and digs through the clutter.

“All right, let’s see,” Dean mutters to himself. “Where the hell did I put that thing?” I reach over and take the tape recorder out of a pocket in the lining of the felt and hand it to him. He grins sheepishly. “Thanks.”

“So when Dad left, why didn’t you go with him?” Sam asks.

“We had business of our own,” Dean says, glancing at me. I don’t know why he doesn’t want to tell Sam that John went off on his own. I don’t know why _I_ don’t want to say that I don’t think whatever John was after in Jericho was the _only_ thing he was hunting. “You know, working our own gigs and stuff.”

“Dad let you go on a hunting trip by yourself?” Sam says skeptically.

Dean looks at Sam, his cheeks the slightest shade of pink. “I’m twenty-six, dude.”

Sam chuckles. “Right. Plus, you had Harley. I’m sure Dad wouldn’t let you go off without supervision.”

Dean smashes his lips together and frowns at Sam. Deciding against a further comment, he shuffles around some folders in the trunk, looking for the article that he put in his jacket earlier today, the only original copy in the folder that John left. The article’s headline is “Centennial Highway Disappearance”, dated September 19th, 2005. I did some research while we were in Allentown and found a string of similar incidents, even more than what John had found.

“Dean, hon.” I reach over to pull the newspaper clipping out of his inside jacket pocket.

“Right,” he says with a grin, and smooths the paper out.

Sam watches us, an interestingly puzzled look on his face.

“All right, here we go. So Dad was apparently checking out this two-lane blacktop just outside of Jericho, California. About a month ago, this guy–” he points to the picture of a man in the article “–Andrew Carey, vanished. They found his car, but he was completely MIA.”

“So maybe he was kidnapped,” Sam says when he finishes skimming the article.

“Yeah, well, here’s another one in April,” Dean says, tossing down a printed article from one of the folders in the trunk. “And another one in December oh-four, oh-three, ninety-eight, ninety-two. I could go on.” He tosses down a printout for each year he mentions. “Ten of them over the past twenty years. All men, all on the same five-mile stretch of road.”

“Since it started happening more often, we think that’s why John went to go dig around,” I say. “That was a little over three weeks ago.”

“We haven’t heard from him since, which was bad enough, until I got this voicemail a few days ago.” Dean holds up the tape recorder and John’s message plays through the small speaker. Somehow it sounds more eerie in the dark alley. Dean stops the recording before it gets to the woman’s voice.

“You know there’s EVP on that?” Sam says.

Dean grins at me, his face inevitably full of pride. “Not bad, Sammy. Kind of like riding a bike, isn’t it?”

Sam just shakes his head.

“All right. I slowed the message down, ran it through a Goldwave, took out the hiss, and this is what I got.” He presses play again.

“ _I can never go home_ …”

“Never go home?” Sam repeats dubiously.

Dean swiftly drops the recorder, takes town the shotgun, shuts the trunk, and leans casually against it, as if he gave Sam a sneak preview and he’ll need to purchase the full-length feature if he wants to know more.

“You know, in almost four years, I never bothered you, never asked you for a thing.”

Sam glances around the alley, at anything but Dean and I. He sighs and finally faces his brother. “All right. I’ll go. I’ll help you find him. But I have to get back first thing Monday. Just wait here.”

“What’s first thing Monday?” Dean asks.

“I have this…” Sam puts his hands on his waist. “I have an interview.”

“What, a job interview?” Dean laughs. “Skip it.”

Sam makes a face at Dean, and it’s almost like he realizes Dean hasn’t changed a bit. “It’s a law school interview, and it’s my whole future on a plate.”

“Law school?” Dean smirks, as if he can’t believe Sam was that serious about college. Apparently neither of them realized there was so much room for change, or lack thereof.

“So we got a deal or not?” Sam says.

When Dean doesn’t respond, Sam just walks away, retreating back into the building. I walk over to Dean and stand in front of him, in between his legs, and rest my arms on his shoulders. He slides his hands around my waist.

I massage the back of his head with the tips of my fingers and he closes his eyes and smiles. “You expected him to just say yes immediately and jump in the Impala, didn’t you?”

He shrugs.

“Dean, Sam’s got a life here. He can’t just leave all that he’s worked for on a whim.” I press my finger to his lips when he opens his mouth to object. “I’m not saying your Dad’s situation is a whim. But you did just basically drop in on his doorstep and ask him to leave his new life behind to go hunting again. Imagine if the tables were turned. Imagine if all of a sudden you had to leave your life of hunting to go sit behind a desk.”

“Dad’s life wouldn’t be at stake if I went to college,” Dean says stubbornly. I just stare at him. “All right, all right. I get it.”

“At least Sam agreed to come. You’ll get to spend some time with him. Be happy about that.”

“Yeah,” he grumbles. “I hate it when you’re right.”

“Sure.”

I lean in and kiss him. We pull apart at the sound of the gated door slamming shut. Sam emerges from the stairs with a duffel bag. Dean gets up off the Impala and goes around to the driver’s side. I take the back seat and let Sam ride shotgun. He tosses his duffel next to me and we drive off into the night.

The next morning, we stop at an old-fashioned mini mart along Route 4 somewhere in Concord so Dean can fill up the gas tank. I curl up in the back seat, using Sam’s duffel bag as a pillow and Dean’s oversized blue jacket as a blanket. Sam sits with his legs hanging outside of the open passenger’s side door, rifling through Dean’s shoe-box of cassettes. The bell to the mini-mart door tinkles and Dean’s voice carries as he sings along to the song on the car radio.

“ _And when it’s time for leavin’, I hope you understand, that I was born a Ramblin’ Man_.” Dean whistles to get our attention. “Hey!”

Sam leans out and looks at Dean, and I lift my head slightly to peer out of the rear windshield. Dean holds up a Gatorade and a few bags of chips. “You want breakfast?”

“No, thanks,” Sam says, a hint of disgust in his voice.

I reach out of the back window and Dean hands me a bag of Cheetos and tosses the rest of the junk food on the seat next to Sam.

“So how’d you pay for that stuff? You and Dad still running credit card scams?”

“Yeah, well, hunting ain’t exactly a pro-ball career,” Dean says. I hear the clanking of the gas nozzle as Dean hooks it back on the pump. “Besides, all we do is apply. It’s not our fault they send us the cards.”

“Yeah? And what names did you write on the application this time?” Sam asks. He swings his legs back inside the car and shuts the door.

Dean slides into the driver’s seat and I offer him my Cheetos from where I lay in the back seat. He digs his hand in the bag and tosses a few in his mouth. “Uh, Burt Aframian, and his son, Hector.” He laughs and closes his door. “Scored two cards out of the deal.”

“That sounds about right,” Sam says. “I swear, man, you’ve gotta update your cassette tape collection.”

I munch my Cheetos like popcorn in a movie theater, anticipating this conversation. No one questions Dean’s music. I learned the hard way.

“Why?” Dean asks defensively.

“Well, for one, they’re cassette tapes. And two, Black Sabbath? Motorhead? Metallica?” He holds up a tape for every band he names. Dean snatches the Metallica one from him. “It’s the greatest hits of mullet rock.”

“Well, house rules, Sammy,” Dean says, popping the tape in the cassette player. I grin, knowing Sam’s going to get The Speech. “Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts his cakehole.” He drops the empty Metallica case back in the box and starts the engine. _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ cuts in mid-song and Dean turns the radio up.

“You know, Sammy is a chubby twelve-year old,” Sam says. “It’s Sam, okay?”

“Sorry, I can’t hear you, the music’s too loud.”

Two hours later we drive past a mile sign labeled Jericho - 7. Sam’s been on the phone with various establishments, checking to see if anyone matching John’s description has been seen recently in the area.

“Thank you,” Sam says to the phone, then flips it closed. “All right. So, there’s no one matching Dad’s description at the local hospital or morgue. So that’s something, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. He doesn’t seem satisfied with that information.

Sam cranes his neck around to observe me in the back seat. “You’ve been pretty quiet back there, Harley. You okay?”

“I’m okay.” I sit up and hang over the bench seat in between Sam and Dean. “Check it out.” I point out to the left, at a large industrial bridge branching off the small highway and cutting through the wilderness. Two police cars are parked at the bridge’s opening and several officers walk around.

Dean pulls over on the opposite side of the road. He leans across Sam to open the glove compartment and pulls out a small wooden box. Sam stares in mild horror as Dean sifts through various ID cards that we’ve collected or created over the years: FBI, DEA, with pictures of Dean, myself, and a few with John on them.

He picks out a dark blue bi-fold badge and grins wildly. “Let’s go.”

“Wait, Dean, we’ve only got one of those,” I say, following the boys out of the car.

“We’ll be fine,” he says, popping his collar up as he crosses the street.

When we get closer I see a dark-skinned deputy lean over the railing of the bridge and yell down, “You guys find anything?”

On either side of the bridge is a steep slope leading to a stony bank and a shallow river. Someone shouts from down below, “No! Nothing!”

The deputy turns around, shaking his head, and goes over to a shabby blue mid-nineties sedan parked sideways in the middle of the bridge with the front doors wide open. Another deputy is inside the car, dusting for prints. He looks up as the first deputy approaches, closely followed by Sam, Dean and I.

“No sign of a struggle, no footprints, no fingerprints.” The deputy in the car looks around, baffled. “Spotless. It’s almost _too_ clean.”

We walk up to the side of the car like we belong there, Dean and I a little more confidently than Sam. Dean leans down and peeks inside the car.

“So, this kid, Tony. He’s dating your daughter, isn’t he?” the dark-skinned deputy asks the one in the car.

“Yeah.”

“How’s Amy doing?”

“She’s putting up missing posters downtown.”

I make a mental note of this for future reference.

“You fellas had another one like this just last month, didn’t you?” Dean asks, puffing out his chest unnecessarily.

Both deputies look over at us. The deputy outside of the car stands up straighter.

“And who are you?”

Dean flashes his badge for a brief second. “Federal Marshals.”

The deputy narrows his eyes. “You three are a little young for Marshals, aren’t you?”

“Thanks, that’s awfully kind of you,” Dean says with a hearty laugh, and pats the deputy on the shoulder.

“You did have another one just like this, correct?” I press, wanting to draw the attention away from Dean before he puts his foot in his mouth.

“Yeah, that’s right,” the deputy says, relaxing a little. “About a mile up the road. There’s been others before that, too.”

“So, this victim, you knew him?” Sam asks.

The deputy nods. “Town like this, everybody knows everybody.”

Dean circles the car, acts like he’s examining it. “Any connection between the victims, besides that they’re all men?”

“No. Not so far as we can tell.”

“So what’s the theory?” I ask.

“Honestly, we don’t know. Serial murder? Kidnapping ring?”

“Well, that’s exactly the kind of crack police work I’d expect out of you guys,” Dean says with a smile. Sam promptly stomps on Dean’s foot.

“Thank you for your time,” I say hastily to the deputy, and I eye the boys with a death glare so we can leave. We’re not even halfway down the remainder of the bridge before Dean smacks Sam upside the head.

“Ow! What’s that for?”

“Why’d you have to step on my foot?” Dean hisses.

“Why do you have to talk to the police like that?” Sam counters.

“Why do you both have to act like children?” I grumble.

Dean glares at me before he moves in front of Sam, forcing him to stop walking. I roll my eyes and fold my arms over my chest, waiting for them to finish their little spat.

“Come on,” Dean says. “They don’t really know what’s going on. We’re all alone on this. I mean, if we’re going to find Dad we’ve got to get to the bottom of this thing ourselves.”

I do a double take over my shoulder and clear my throat loudly. The boys look over and grow quiet. A sheriff and two FBI agents in fancy suits strut onto the bridge and approach us.

“Can I help you?” the sheriff asks.

“No, sir, we were just leaving,” Dean says with one of his award-winning smiles. As the FBI agents walk past him, he nods at each of them in turn and mutters, “Agent Mulder. Agent Scully.”

I grab Dean’s jacket, trying not to let the sheriff see me fight back laughter, and the three of us head back to the car. “No more _X-Files_ reruns for you,” I whisper to Dean. He chuckles.

We resume our places in the Impala, with me still hanging over the front seat, and Dean drives away, heading towards town.

“That deputy said his daughter was putting up posters,” I say. “We should talk to her. You know, since her boyfriend got snatched by the mean, evil spirit last night.”

“We don’t know that this is a spirit,” Sam says.

“The list of things it could be is slimming down,” I say. “There aren’t that many creatures out there that are extremely dangerous and can take grown men without leaving a trace.” Sam shrugs and Dean throws a sideways smirk at him.

At the edge of downtown Dean parks the Impala in front of a donut shop. We get out and follow the trail of purple fliers with a teenage boy’s face on it. They go all the way to the Highland movie theater in the center of Main Street.

A young woman with chopped black hair, thick, dark eye make-up with the dark clothes to match tacks up a purple flier on a bulletin board on the side of the theater. I childishly think how the jock football star persona in the flier could ever go out with Miss Goth Queen over there.

“You must be Amy,” Dean says when we approach the girl.

She looks us up and down before turning back to her work. “Yeah.”

“Yeah, Troy told us about you,” Dean says. “We’re his uncles.” He puts his arm around me. “That’s Sammy. I’m Dean. This is my girlfriend, Harley.”

My heart does a backflip and catches in my throat. Sam glances at me. I ignore him. I can’t tell if Dean called me his girlfriend because it’s obvious that I’m not an uncle and I need a cover or because that’s what we are. In two years we’ve never discussed that part of…whatever we are.

“He never mentioned you to me,” Amy says dully, and walks away. She’s gonna be a tough nut to crack.

“Well, that’s Troy, I guess,” Dean says. He walks after her and Sam and I follow behind him. He still throws glances at me now and then. I wish he wouldn’t. “We’re not around much. We’re up in Modesto.”

Sam steps in. “So, we’re looking for him, too. We’re kind of asking around.”

Another young girl, about the same age as Amy, steps out if the diner ahead of us and puts a comforting hand on Amy’s arm. “Hey, are you okay?” If Amy is night, this girl is day. Blond hair, bright blue eyes, a yellow t-shirt and jeans.

“Yeah,” Amy says.

“You mind if we ask you a couple of questions?” I ask.

Amy and the other girl exchange looks, communicating with their eyes. After a moment, Amy nods and we follow the girls into the diner. Amy and the girl she introduces us to as Rachel sit across from Sam, Dean and I in a booth.

“Can you tell us what happened?” I ask Amy.

She just shrugs. “I was on the phone with Troy. He was driving home. He said he would call me right back, and…he never did.”

“He didn’t say anything strange, or out of the ordinary?” Sam asks.

Amy shakes her head. “No. Nothing I can remember.”

I observe Amy and Rachel, finding many differences and few similarities between them. It seems like Rachel would be much more like Troy’s type. I can’t be one to judge, though. People can like who they like. I nod towards Amy’s neck, where she seems to be subconsciously touching a pendant on a black string every so often. “I like your necklace.”

She looks down at the pendant, a pentagram in a circle. A symbol we’re all too familiar with. “Troy gave it to me. Mostly to scare my parents.” She laughs lightly at the memory. “With all that devil stuff, you know.”

Sam laughs a little and looks down. Dean and I turn to him. “Actually, it means just the opposite. A pentagram is a protection against evil. Really powerful. I mean, if you believe in that kind of thing.”

“Okay. Thank you, _Unsolved Mysteries_ ,” Dean quips, and I’m so glad I’m squished between them so they don’t start something. Dean takes his arm off the back of the seat and leans forward. “Here’s the deal, ladies. The way Troy disappeared, something’s not right. So if you’ve heard anything…”

Amy and Rachel look at each other nervously.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Well, it’s just…” Rachel stops, but Amy nudges her to go on. “I mean, with all these guys going missing, people talk.”

The three of us speak in chorus: “What do they talk about?”

“It’s kind of this local legend?” Rachel gets an uncomfortable look on her face. “This one girl…she got murdered out on Centennial, like, decades ago. Supposedly, she’s still out there,” she says darkly.

Sam watches Rachel attentively, nodding as she speaks, ignoring how Dean and I stare at him. So it is possible that we’re dealing with a spirit.

“She hitchhikes, and whoever picks her up…well, they disappear forever.”

Sam, Dean and I look at each other. We’ve got all we need to go from here. Sam thanks Amy and Rachel and we head back to the Impala.

Twenty minutes later, I sit with my feet propped up on a table in the local library, watching Dean and Sam squabble over the single computer. I bite at my nails, bored, and think Dean and I could get so much more done if we were alone. And if we were alone we could get our nightly workout as well. I try not to remember that I’m the one that pushed to come ask Sam for help. Little did I know neither of them had done much growing up in the last twelve years.

Dean wins the keyboard and types ‘Female, Murder, Hitchhiking’ into the archive search page on the web browser. He hits Enter and the screen tells him there are no results. He wrinkles his nose and replaces ‘Hitchhiking’ with ‘Centennial Highway’. Smiling smugly, he presses the Enter key again, only to come up with zero results. His face drops.

“Let me try,” Sam says, reaching for the keyboard.

Dean smacks Sam’s hand. “I got it.”

Sam glares at Dean and shoves Dean’s chair out of the way with his foot. He moves in front of the computer and takes over.

“Dude!” Dean hits Sam in the shoulder. “You’re such a control freak.” I pull Dean back towards me and rub his neck. He relaxes a little.

“So, angry spirits are born out of violent deaths, right?” Sam says, clacking away on the keyboard. “Well, maybe it’s not murder.”

“What part of murder isn’t violent?” I say.

Sam ignores me and flicks the Enter key. An article pops up on the screen. All he did was change ‘Murder’ to ‘Suicide’. Sam opens the article, entitled _Suicide on Centennial_ , dated April 25, 1981. Dean and I lean in closer and read over Sam’s shoulder.

A local woman’s drowning death was ruled a suicide. Constance Welch, 24, of 4636 Breckenridge Road, leaped off Sylvania Bridge at mile 33 of Centennial Highway and subsequently drowned. A Deputy J. Pierce told reporters that, hours before her death, Ms. Welch logged a call with 911 Emergency Services, describing in a panicked tone how she found her two young children, 5 and 6 years old, in the bathtub, after leaving them alone for several minutes. Her husband, Joseph Welch, made a statement that losing her children must have been too much for Constance to bear. Underneath a picture of Joseph Welch, it lists his occupation as the associate manager of the graveyard shift at Frontier Auto salvage yard. Next to his picture is a photo of a beautiful, dark-haired young woman, Constance Welch.

“This was 1981,” Sam says after he finishes reading the article. “Constance Welch jumped off the bridge and drowned in the river.”

“Oh, God,” I say, after getting to the part about the kids. “She just leaves her children alone for a few minutes and when she comes back, they aren’t breathing.” I shudder. “They both die.”

Dean raises his eyebrows. “Hmm. That bridge look familiar to you?”

I skim the article again for the name. “Sylvania Bridge. Want to head back there?”

“Yeah, but later,” Sam says. “Give the police time to clean up the crime scene. We’ll go tonight.”

“In the meantime, let’s get some food. I’m starving.” Dean stands up and leaves the library without waiting for me or Sam.

We go back to the diner where we talked to Amy and Rachel for dinner and hang around there until closing, around eleven o’clock. It takes a little under an hour to get back to the bridge, so by stereotypical midnight, the three of us walk along it.

About a quarter of the way down the bridge I stop, lean on the railing. The river babbles over the rocks below, unseen in the dark. “This is where Constance took the swan dive,” I say.

Sam stops and puts his hands on his waist. “You think Dad would have been here?”

“Well, he’s chasing the same story and we’re chasing him.” Dean taps my elbow and we continue to walk.

“Okay, so now what?” Sam says. He sounds edgy, impatient.

“Now we keep digging until we find him. Might take a while,” Dean says.

Sam stops. “Dean, I told you, I’ve got to get back by Monday–”

“Monday. Right,” Dean says, turning around and cutting him off. “The interview, I forgot. You’re really serious about this, aren’t you? You think you’re just going to become some lawyer? Marry your girl?”

“Maybe. Why not?”

“Does Jessica know the truth about you?” Dean asks harshly. “I mean, does she know about the things you’ve done?”

“Dean,” I say quietly.

Sam steps closer, threateningly. “No, and she’s not going to know.”

“Well, that’s healthy. You can pretend all you want, Sammy, but sooner or later you’re going to have to face up to who you really are.” Dean turns and stalks off.

“And who’s that?” Sam calls.

“You’re one of us!” Dean yells.

Sam puts on a burst of speed and jumps in front of Dean. “No. I’m not like you. This is not going to be my life.”

“You have a responsibility to–”

“To Dad? And his crusade?” Sam laughs, almost hysterically. “If it weren’t for pictures I wouldn’t even know what Mom looks like. And what difference would it make? Even if we do find the thing that killed her, Mom’s gone. And she isn’t coming back.”

Dean suddenly grabs Sam by the collar and shoves him roughly against the wide support beam of the bridge. _Shit_ , I think, and begin to jog over to them.

“Don’t you fucking talk about her like that,” Dean says through gritted teeth. He presses his hands harder into Sam’s throat.

I go up to Dean and grab his arm. “Whoa, Dean. Calm down.” Without looking at either of us, Dean releases Sam, shrugs off my grasp, and heads farther down the bridge. He doesn’t make it far before he stops in his tracks, back still to us.

“Sam. Harley,” he calls.

Sam and I look over. Up ahead, standing on the railing, is a dark-haired woman in a white nightgown flowing in the breeze. Constance. She looks at us, then steps forward off the edge. The three of us hurry to the railing where she disappeared and look over, but she’s gone.

“Where’d she go?” Dean says.

“I don’t know,” I say.

The Impala’s engine roars to life. We spin around, illuminated by the headlights.

“What the–” Dean starts, shading his eyes and squinting through the bright light.

“Dean, who’s driving your car?” I ask quietly.

Silently, Dean pulls his keys out of his pocket and jingles them. The car jerks into motion, picking up speed incredibly fast.

“Dean?” Sam says worriedly. He spins me around and takes off. “Go! Go!”

The three of us run at top speed away from the Impala, which moves faster than we are. I haven’t tried running this fast in a long time and I can feel my right leg starting to quiver. I make a beeline for the side of the railing when the car gets too close. The boys follow, and we go over. The Impala skids to a halt.

I yell out, grunting with the effort of holding myself up. I look to my left and see that Sam caught himself on the ledge jutting out from the railing as well. I pull myself up, with a lot of effort, and tell myself I seriously need to work on my upper body strength. Once on the right side of the bridge, Sam and I look around. We’re the only ones there.

“Dean?” Sam calls out. “Dean!”

“What?” comes Dean’s muffled voice from far below us. He’s sprawled out in the mud, filthy and annoyed, barely visible in the darkness.

“Are you all right?” I shout.

He holds up an A-OK sign with his hand. “I’m super,” he says sarcastically.

Sam and I laugh, equally relieved, and head around to the steep slope to help Dean up. By the time we get there Dean already made his way – on all fours – to the top of the hill. He stomps onto the bridge, covered from head to foot in mud and guck.

“Gotta check my baby,” he says, keys in hand. He goes over and pops the Impala’s hood. I hold up a flashlight so he can poke around in there. I make faces at Sam the entire time, because Dean _stinks_.

Finally, Dean shuts the hood and leans on it. I click off the flashlight and sigh.

“Your car all right?” Sam asks.

“Yeah. Whatever she did to it, seems all right now.” Dean shakes his head angrily. “That Constance chick, what a _bitch!_ ” His last word echoes in the night.

“Well, she doesn’t want us digging around, that’s for sure,” I say. “If John came here, he would have hit the same speed bump. What if…”

“What if what?” Dean demands.

I wince. Crap. I should have never opened my mouth. “What if John led us here to finish a job so he could move on to…more important things.”

“More important things?” Dean repeats, nostrils flaring. “Like the demon?”

I shrug. “He’s been acting odd for a while.”

“No.” Dean shakes his head with determination. “If Dad was onto something, he would have told me. He would have taken me along!”

“Dean, when I met you guys at the Roadhouse, John was going after a lead on the demon and he sent you to Colorado. He’s been trying to avoid bringing you into this for years.”

Dean takes a few deep, pissed off breaths, then releases the rest of his anger by pacing in front of the Impala a few times before dejectedly leaning against it once more.

“So where’s the job go from here, genius?” Sam says lightly as he settles on the hood next to Dean, who just throws up his arms in frustration and then starts picking mud off of his hands.

I lean forward and sniff Dean. “You smell like a toilet.”

Dean looks down, then opens his arms, grinning so the drying mud on his face sends long cracks through it. “You want some of this?” He jumps forward with puckered lips and I squeal and jump behind Sam. “Let’s get going. I need a shower.”

Dawn breaks by the time we reach the nearest motel in town. We enter the lobby with our bags. Dean tosses his Hector Aframian MasterCard on the handwritten guest ledger. “One room, please,” he says.

The clerk picks up the card and eyes the mud-caked Dean, then Sam and I standing behind him. “You guys having a reunion or something?”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I had another guy, Burt Aframian. He came and bought out a room for the whole month.”

Dean turns around, eyebrows raised. Then he throws a brief scowl at me before turning back to the clerk with a smile. “No, no relation.”

Okay, so maybe I was wrong about John. Well, no, not necessarily. The room just means John’s _been_ here, not that he stayed. And he’s got nearly a month’s head start on us.

The clerk charges Dean’s card and asks him to sign in before handing him a key. To Room 5. Dean leads us around to Room 18.

“Burt Aframian signed in to this room,” Dean says. “Got the lock pick, Harley?”

“Yeah.” I hand Sam my bag and tell him and Dean to keep a look out. The lock springs easily and the motel door swings open. I take my bag back from Sam and step inside, pocketing the lock pick. Sam follows but has to double back and yank Dean inside, because he’s not paying attention. Sam closes the door and flips on the light and I immediately see why John never wanted to let Dean and I into his rooms.

Every vertical surface has papers pinned to it: maps, newspaper clippings, pictures, notes, yarn connecting locations and images – hardly any space isn’t covered. There’s books stacked haphazardly on the desk, a couple of them lay open, and there’s so much junk thrown around, on the floor, on the bed. Including something with a hazardous materials symbol.

“Whoa,” I say breathlessly.

Dean goes over to the nightstand and picks up a half-eaten hamburger. He sniffs it and recoils. “I don’t think he’s been here for a couple days at least.”

Sam crouches down by a thick line of salt on the floor. He touches it gingerly, his fingers making lines in the grains, and looks up. “Salt, cats-eye shells…he was worried. Trying to keep something from coming in. What have you got there?”

It takes me a moment to realize he’s talking to me. I was looking closer at the papers covering one wall. “Centennial Highway victims,” I tell him. I read off some of the names that I never found in our research. “William Durrell, Caucasian, age 28, disappeared in 1987. Scott Nifong, Chinese, age 21, disappeared 1983. Steven Parks, Caucasian, age 33, disappeared 1990. Mark Brown, African-American, age 30, disappeared 1998.”

“I don’t get it,” Dean says. “I mean, different men, different jobs, ages, ethnicities. There’s always a connection, right? What do these guys have in common?”

Sam turns on another lamp and points at a more sinister looking clump of pictures and articles. Something about the Bell Witch, two people being burned alive, a skeletal person blowing a horn at several scared people with a handwritten note: _Mortis Danse_. A column about devils and demons, another about “Sirens, Witches, the Possessed”, which is next to a wooden pentacle and another handwritten note that says, _Woman in White_ above a printout of the _Jericho Herald,_ Constance’s suicide article.

“Dad figured it out,” Sam says. “He found the same article we did. Constance Welch. She’s the woman in white.”

“You sly dogs,” Dean tells the photos of Constance’s victims with a chuckle. “All right, so if we’re dealing with a woman in white, Dad would have found the corpse and destroyed it.”

Dean’s words still ring in my head. _You sly dogs_. I know the lore about women in white, and it doesn’t bode well for us. All these crazy thoughts about why John would have tried to keep Dean and I – or just Dean – from this case flood my head. I was _very_ wrong about John leading us here, then.

“She might have another weakness,” Sam says, distracting me.

“Well, Dad would want to make sure,” Dean says. “He’d dig her up. Does it say where she’s buried?”

“No, not that I can tell,” I say, because I’ve been staring at the article this entire time. “If I were John, though, I’d go ask her husband. _If_ he’s still alive.”

“All right. Why don’t you, uh, see if you can find and address, Sammy,” Dean says. “I’m gonna get cleaned up.” His eyes flick to me before he turns to the bathroom. He’s trying to get Sam out of the room so we can be alone.

“Hey, Dean?” Sam calls. “What I said earlier, about Mom and Dad…I’m sorry.”

Dean holds up his hand. “No chick-flick moments.”

Sam laughs lightly and nods. “All right. Jerk.”

“Bitch.” Dean smiles and closes the bathroom door.

I watch Sam. He keeps up a small smile until he focuses on something across the room. He goes over for a closer look, his smile slowly fading. A rosary hangs in front of a large mirror, and stuck into the side of the frame under the rosary is an old photo with frayed edges. It’s of John sitting on the hood of the Impala with a young Dean, maybe twelve years old, next to him and a small Sam, on John’s lap. Sam takes the photo off the mirror and holds it, staring at it sadly.

“Sam?” I say.

He jumps and tucks the picture in his pocket. “Hey,” he says nervously.

I wait until I hear the shower turn on to say, “You know he just misses you, right? More than you can imagine.”

Sam ducks his head. “It’s not that I don’t miss him, too. It’s just…” He runs his hand through his shaggy brown hair, making it stick up in the front. “He just doesn’t get it. Why I can’t stay.”

I nod and sit down on one of the beds. Sam sits down across from me.

“So, uh, what’s going on between you two?” he asks.

Before the sly dogs comment, before the woman in white situation, I would have been glad to talk to Sam about whatever it is Dean and I have going on. Now that there’s a chance that John thought Dean would jump on the next hot girl he saw if given the chance and become a target for Constance, I’m not so sure I want to confirm anything. I got a taste of that when we met Jessica.

So I just shrug indifferently. “There aren’t any labels for it.”

“Ah,” Sam says. He doesn’t believe me.

“Better find that address, then.” I grab my laptop from my bag and clear off a space at the table. It takes me all of five minutes to find a work address for Frontier Auto salvage yard, last known work address for Joseph Welch, and we already have his last known home address and there’s no record of him moving to a new place. Personally, if my significant other let the kids die in that house and then offed themselves, I would have high-tailed it out of there. I jot down the address and close my laptop. The awkward silence fills the room like steam from Dean’s shower.

Sam’s phone beeps. He opens it and presses a button, then holds the phone to his ear. In the quiet I can hear a woman’s voice on the other end. It’s a voicemail from Jessica.

The bathroom door opens, releasing the steam and dissipating the tension in the room. Dean emerges in fresh clothes. He grabs his leather jacket from his bag and pulls it on, smiling at me. If Sam wasn’t here, he probably thinks he wouldn’t have taken that shower by himself.

But then my stomach churns nervously as I hear _You sly dogs_ again in my head. I shake it off as best I can.

“I’m starving,” Dean announces. “I’m gonna grab a little something to eat at the diner down the street. You guys want anything?”

I shake my head and Sam says, “No.”

“Aframian’s buying,” Dean urges.

“Mm-mm,” Sam says, shaking his head. He’s still got the phone to his ear.

Dean shrugs and grabs his wallet and keys. He touches my shoulder on his way out, sending a jolt of electricity through me. _Great_ , I think to myself. Am I going to be one of those needy girls that needs confirmation of what we are to be content? I’ve dealt with it just fine for two years. Why is this so different?

My phone vibrates in my pocket. It’s Dean. “What?”

“Five-oh. Take off.”

I stand up and peek through the curtains. From across the parking lot, two police officers approach Dean, who hasn’t even made it off the porch.

“What about you?” I ask anxiously.

“Uh, they kind of spotted me. Get Sam. Go find Dad.” He hangs up the phone and turns to smile broadly at the deputies. I hear his muffled voice through the glass. “Problem, officers?” he says, stepping out to the parking lot.

“Where are your partners?” one of them asks. He’s the one we spoke to on the bridge. I now realize he’s the head deputy.

Dean chuckles uneasily. “Partners? What partners?”

The head deputy jerks his thumb towards the motel room and his partner heads over to it. I leap over the chair and click the lock shut and drag the chain across as silently as I can. The door handle jiggles from the outside for a moment, then stops. I let out my breath, relieved.

“Harley?” Sam says, standing up.

“Shh,” I say, and gesture him over to the window. We crouch down low and watch.

“So,” the head deputy says. “Fake U.S. Marshal. Fake credit cards. You got anything that’s real?”

Dean grins wide. “My boobs.”

The second deputy slams Dean down over the hood of the cop car parked in front of our room. I cringe. The head deputy starts to read Dean his rights. I put my face in my hands. I didn’t think it would be this difficult watching Dean get arrested and hauled off to jail.

“So how do we get out of here?” I whisper to Sam. “It’s not like there’s a back exit.”

Sam thinks for a moment. “Get your stuff. When they drive away, we’re making a run for the car.”

I groan. “I guess I’m hotwiring it.”

“Why?”

I throw him a look. “Dean has the keys.”

We watch as the cop car disappears around the corner and book it to the Impala across the parking lot, in front of the room we were supposed to stay in. Sam throws our bags in the back seat while I lean down and pop off the cover under the steering wheel and grab two wires and start tapping them together.

“Uh, Harley,” Sam says.

“Little busy, Sam,” I grumble.

“Yeah, well, hurry it up. We’ve got company.”

I look over the dash and see the motel clerk running out to the car, phone in hand, probably calling 911 again. “Come on!” I yell at the wires. As if that was the encouragement they needed, the wires give a bright spark and the engine roars to life. I throw the car in drive and the tires squeal loudly as I tear out of the parking lot, leaving the clerk in the dust.

“We need to disappear for a bit,” Sam says. “They know our car. They’ll be looking for us.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“It doesn’t matter. Go west. We’ll get out of town for a couple of hours and then hit the salvage yard this evening.”

I yawn loudly. “Wherever we go, I’m gonna take a nap.”

I drive north to the highway and then we head west to the coast. I park under a tree in the parking lot next to the beach and rest my head back against the seat. Sam gets out and wanders over to the sand, cell phone in hand. Probably about to call Jessica.

For the first time since I met up with Dean two years ago, I wonder what it would be like to have a normal life. A normal relationship. Normal friends. No scary monsters and guns and shady motel rooms. I wonder if Sam made the right decision, and wonder if it would be worth following suit.

I fall asleep to the lull of crashing waves and cawing seagulls, with a dream of Dean and I in our own little house, somewhere near the ocean. He’ll work on cars and maybe I’ll write, or paint. Or learn to paint. I could learn to do so much in this life if my brain wasn’t nearly one-hundred-percent occupied with hunting….

Sam shakes my shoulder sometime later. When I reluctantly open my eyes, the sky outside is no longer a crystal clear blue. Hues of purple and orange infiltrate the azure blanket, interspersed with wispy white clouds. I groan and sit up.

“I don’t know how Dean’s gotten any sleep in the past few years,” Sam comments as he shuts his door.

I sit up and stretch before starting the car via wires again. “What do you mean?”

“You snore like a chainsaw.”

I scowl, and Sam laughs.

I drive more like Dean on the way back to Jericho because if I drove at my usual leisurely speed, we wouldn’t arrive back in town until well after dark. We want to appear at least semi-polite and arrive at Frontier Auto salvage yard at a decent hour.

Sam pulls out a map and the piece of paper I wrote the address on and directs me to the salvage yard when we’re closer to town. When we arrive, we discover Joseph Welch has made the salvage yard his new home. I knock on the front door of the only building in the lot, only minimally disgusted by the amount of grime covering the windows of the shop. An old man opens it.

“Hi. Are you Joseph Welch?” Sam says.

“Yeah,” the man grunts.

“Uh, we’re looking for someone,” I say. “Has this man come and talked to you?”

Sam hands Joseph the picture he took from John’s room. Joseph studies it for a moment and hands it back. “Yeah, he was older, but that’s him. He came by three or four days ago. Said he was a reporter.”

“That’s right,” Sam says. “We’re working on a story together.”

Joseph gets visibly angry. “Well, I don’t know what the hell kinda story you’re working on. The questions he asked me?” He spits on the floor.

“About your wife, Constance?” I ask.

“He asked me where she was buried.”

“And, uh, where is that again?” Sam asks nervously, rubbing the back of his neck.

“What, I gotta go through this twice?” Joseph asks, exasperated.

“It’s fact-checking,” I say quickly. “If you don’t mind.”

He grumbles and closes the door behind him. We follow him away from the ramshackle building and walk through the salvage yard, which is nothing compared to Bobby’s. This place is more like a scrap yard that hasn’t been used in twenty years.

“She’s buried in a plot,” Joseph says. “Behind my old place over on Breckenridge.”

“And why did you move?” Sam asks. I bite my lip nervously.

Joseph stops walking and says in a low, hard voice, “I’m not gonna live in the house where my children died.”

“Right,” Sam says awkwardly.

“Mr. Welch, did you ever marry again?” I ask suddenly.

“No way,” Joseph says, a little too quickly. “Constance, she was the love of my life. Prettiest woman I ever known.”

“So you had a happy marriage?” I probe.

This time, Joseph hesitates. “Definitely,” he says slowly.

I nod. “Well, that should do it. Thanks for your time.” I grab Sam’s elbow and drag him along, back to the car.

“What are you doing?” he whispers.

I stop, slightly infuriated, thinking of Dean again, and turn back to Joseph. “Mr. Welch, did you ever hear of a woman in white?”

“Harley!” Sam hisses.

“A what?” Joseph asks.

“A woman in white,” I say again, clearly, slowly. Dangerously. I stalk closer and closer to Joseph until I’m only a foot away from him. “Or sometimes a weeping woman?” He just stares at me blankly, so I continue to fire bullets. “It’s a ghost story. Well, it’s more of a phenomenon, really. They’re spirits. They’ve been sighted for hundreds of years, dozens of places. All of these are different women.” I look at him curiously, a haunting smile playing on my lips. “You understand, right? Different women that all share the same story.”

“Girl, I don’t care much for nonsense,” Joseph growls. He turns away but I don’t let him make it very far. My next words stop him in his tracks.

“See, when they were alive, their husbands were unfaithful to them. And these women, basically suffering from temporary insanity, murdered their children.” Right now, Joseph looks like he wants to murder _me_. But I hold my ground. “Then, once they realized what they had done, they took their own lives. So now their spirits are cursed, walking back roads, waterways. And if they find an unfaithful man, they kill him. And that man is never seen again.”

Joseph’s hands ball into fists and his faces burns beet red. If it’s from anger, grief, guilt, I can’t tell. After a long moment, he storms away, and I have my answer. Behind me, Sam sighs.

“You could have been a little nicer,” he says.

I glare at him. “Let’s go get Dean. We’ve gotta find a way to break that asshole out of jail.” I take off to the car.

“Is that what this is about? Did Dean do something to you?”

“No.” I fumble with the wires again, trying to get the car started.

“Then what?”

I exhale angrily. Maybe Sam _should_ be a lawyer because the persistent jerk never shuts up. “I think John hid this case from Dean because he was afraid if Dean went after the woman in white she would take him.” I look down at my lap, fold my hands over and over. “I mean, Dean and I have something going on but…” I meet Sam’s eyes. “You know how he is.”

Sam nods solemnly. “If it makes you feel any better, he seems different with you.”

I laugh skeptically.

“I’m serious. I’ve never seen him want to be with anyone for longer than a day. Longer than a night. He cares about you.”

The wires finally catch and the engine starts. Thank God. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. “Can you call the sheriff’s station? Pick a street from the map, maybe one far away, and tell them there’s shots fired or something.”

“Okay,” Sam says quietly. He makes the call while I navigate back to town. I figure I’ll make my way back to the sheriff’s station, or at least in the direction of it, and wait for Dean to make his escape. It’s such a small town that at this hour it’d be all hands on deck, leaving less officials for Dean to sneak past.

Without Sam’s guidance I manage to get us onto Centennial Highway by accident. I wouldn’t want to be on this road in the daytime, let alone at night. I drive fast, hoping this stretch of road ends soon.

Sam’s phone rings and he answers it. It’s Dean calling from a payphone. He turns the speakerphone on so we both can hear.

“Fake nine-one-one call? I don’t know, Sammy, that’s pretty illegal,” Dean says spiritedly.

“It was Harley’s idea,” Sam says.

“You’re welcome,” I say, loud enough for the speaker to catch across the car. Sam grins.

“Listen, guys, we gotta talk,” Dean says, losing his lighthearted tone.

“Tell me about it,” Sam says. “So the husband was unfaithful. Found that out thanks to Harley’s bad-cop ruse. We _are_ dealing with a woman in white. And she’s buried behind her old house, so that should have been Dad’s next stop.”

“Jeeze, Sammy, would you shut up for a second?” Dean says, but Sam goes on.

“I just can’t figure out why Dad hasn’t destroyed the corpse yet.”

“Well, that’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Dean gripes. “He’s gone. Dad left Jericho.”

Sam and I look at each other, eyebrows raised.

“What? How do you know?” Sam asks.

“I’ve got his journal,” Dean says.

“He doesn’t go anywhere without that thing,” I say, remembering how that battered old journal was basically an extension of John’s arm when we hunted together. Just like my dad’s is to me.

“Yeah, well, he did this time,” Dean says.

“What’s it say?” Sam asks.

“Ah, the same old ex-Marine crap when he wants to let us know where he’s going.”

“Coordinates.” Sam rubs his face.

“Where to?” I ask.

“I’m not sure yet.”

Sam shakes his head. “I don’t understand. I mean, what could be so important that Dad would just skip out in the middle of a job? Dean, what the hell is going – Harley, look out!”

One moment, the long stretch of road in front of the Impala is completely empty. Then, quicker than my heart can beat once, a tall, slender woman in a flowing white nightgown materializes in the middle of the road. I gasp and slam on the brakes. The momentum of the car is too great and it goes right through her before coming to a halt.

Dean’s voice comes from the floor. “Sam? Harley? What happened?” I groan and rub my collar bone, where the seatbelt dug into it.

“You all right?” Sam asks.

I nod. “You?”

“Yeah.”

“Take me home,” a wispy voice says from the back seat. Sam and I jump and look behind us. Constance is there, staring angrily between the two of us. When neither of us moves, she screeches, “Take me home!”

“No,” I say.

The driver’s side door opens and my seatbelt unbuckles. I stare down at it, then up at Sam, who hasn’t moved an inch. Suddenly I’m thrown from the car. I land on my back on the cold asphalt. I groan and roll over. The door swings shut again and the locks click. Sam’s still in the passenger’s side, struggling to open the door. Just like on the bridge, the car turns on and starts to drive itself down the road. I get up and run after it, but it’s going too fast.

“Shit!” I scream. I’m stranded in the middle of a dark highway with no way to contact Dean. He called from a payphone so the police probably still have his cell phone. I yell out in frustration and start running back to town. If Constance wants to go back home, she’s probably taking Sam to Breckenridge Road. I need to find Dean and get our asses to that house before she kills Sam.

After what seems like hours, I finally reach the edge of town, my legs and chest burning. I stop for a moment to catch my breath, instantly regretting the decision because now it’s going to be that much harder to get going again. I take long, deep breaths, preparing myself to take off at a sprint, when a car horn blows from my right and headlights blind me.

A tiny grey car pulls up and Dean leans out of the driver’s side window. “Get in,” he orders. Without hesitating I run around to the passenger’s side and Dean takes off.

“Did you steal this?” I ask, still breathing hard.

“Are you surprised?”

“No.” Between breaths I say, “Constance has Sam. She’s taking him to her old house.”

“I figured.” He presses the gas pedal down farther. Reluctantly, the car picks up speed and we race off into the night.

Dean kills the headlights as we turn onto an abandoned road and see the Impala stopped in front of what I can only describe as a haunted house. Old wood, chipped paint, dirty and broken windows with a few missing altogether. Even the front door hangs off the last hinge and swings eerily in the wind. We pull up a little ways away from the Impala. As soon as we’re out of the car I hear Sam and Constance struggling. Constance keeps telling Sam to hold her.

“You can’t kill me!” Sam shouts. “I’m not unfaithful! I’ve never been!”

“You will be,” Constance says wickedly.

Then, Sam yells out in pain. Dean and I run around on opposite sides of the Impala. He produces a gun from I don’t know where, he probably stole that, too, and raises it towards the driver’s side window.

“Duck!” he shouts at me.

I hit the floor and crawl over to the door. The gun goes off twice, shattering the driver’s window and lodging in passenger’s one. I poke my head up and see Sam lying across the front seat, alone, gripping his chest. The front of his sweatshirt has five holes burned into it. Five holes, five fingers. Constance was trying to rip out Sam’s heart.

Constance reappears in the car, screeching at the top of her lungs. Dean releases the rest of his clip into her and I duck back down, covering the back of my head. When he’s out of bullets Sam sits up and growls, “I’m taking you home.”

The car jolts forward and Dean stares with his jaw dropped as Sam smashes the car right through the side of the house. Dean gives a little whimper and we chase after Sam, hunting through the wreckage to try to pull him out of the car.

“Sam! Sam!” I yell, tossing aside pieces of wood and glass.

“You okay?” Dean calls.

“I think.” Sam’s head emerges from the rubble.

“Can you move?” Dean asks.

“Yeah. Help me?”

Dean and I lean forward and heave Sam out through the passenger’s side window. Sam groans in pain when he slices his leg on a piece of the broken glass window. When he’s upright, we help him get his bearings.

The silence following the crash pierces the night and draws our attention forward. We all look up to find Constance glaring at us. She throws down the picture frame she was holding and lets out another angry, ear-piercing screech. A wide, old-fashioned bureau comes flying across the room and pins the three of us against the car. I groan and try to push it away from me. Dean and Sam are doing the same, so I give up. If two strong boys can’t get the bureau off us, then I certainly can’t.

The lights flicker and Constance looks around, her eyes widening in fright. I’ve never seen a spirit scared before. The sound of rushing water fills the house and then actual water comes pouring down the staircase from the upper floor, dripping through the spokes in the banister, trailing down each step. Constance slowly walks over to the bottom of the stairs, her face lifted up to a boy and a girl that materialized at the top. They hold hands, and when they speak, they speak together in an creepy, tinkley voice.

“You’ve come home to us, Mommy.”

Constance stares at them, distraught. She tries to turn away but the boy and the girl flicker at the top of the stairs and appear next to her. They embrace her tightly and Constance screams, her spirit flashing. In a surge of blue energy, Constance and the two children liquefy into a puddle on the floor. As soon as they disappear, the pressure of the bureau lessens and we’re able to push it away from us.

The three of us go over, slowly, to the spot where the spirits vanished. Scorch marks surround the wet wood.

“So this is where she drowned her kids,” Dean says.

“That’s why she could never go home.” I look over at Sam, and he nods.

“She was too scared to face them.”

“You found her weak spot. Nice work, Sammy.” Dean slaps Sam on the chest, right in the center of the burn marks on his sweatshirt. Sam coughs and chokes it into a laugh.

“Yeah, I wish I could say the same for you. What were you thinking, shooting Casper in the face, you freak?” he says.

Dean scowls. “Hey. Saved your ass.” He circles his car, futilely dusting off the windshield. “I’ll tell you another thing. If you screwed up my car?” He twists around and makes a face at Sam. “I’ll kill you.”

Sam laughs, but I find it necessary to point out that Dean’s the one that decided to play bulls-eye with the windows. Dean just rolls his eyes and places his hands on the hood.

“Help me get her out of here, will you?”

We struggle to get the Impala on level ground and find that it’s only suffered two shattered windows, a broken headlight, and a couple of scratches to the grill. It’s a tough car.

Since Dean’s now a fugitive and we don’t really have anyone in town we were really trying to help, we decide it’s best to just hit the road. I resume my place in the back seat, mainly because I seriously need a shower after running a couple miles and I don’t want to be too close to the boys. Sam has John’s journal open on his lap to a page that simply contains Dean’s name and the numbers 32-96. He holds a flashlight under his chin as he tries to find the coordinates on a map with a ruler.

“Okay, here’s where Dad went,” Sam finally says. He has to yell because Dean drives fast and the windows are down since we really don’t have any other choice. “Oh, God. It’s Richardson, Texas.”

Dean nods. “Sounds charming. How far?”

“About…fifteen hundred miles.”

“Richardson?” I repeat after a moment. “It’s so simple. Nothing eye-catching about that place. I wonder why your dad made it so secretive.”

Dean shrugs with a glance at me through the rearview mirror before grinning at Sam. “Hey, if we shag ass we could make it by tomorrow morning.”

Sam hesitates. Dean snaps his head back to the road, his expression hard.

“Dean, I, um…”

“You’re not going,” Dean says unassumingly.

“The interview’s in like, ten hours,” Sam says. “I gotta be there.”

Dean just nods, clearly disappointed. “Yeah. Yeah, whatever. I’ll take you home.”

I feel so bad for him. He finally got to see Sam again after four years and the majority of the time all they did was fight. And they aren’t any closer to finding their dad. Sam clicks off the flashlight and rests his head back on the seat.

Three hours later we pull up in front of Sam’s apartment. Dean’s resolute face is still set in a frown. He doesn’t look at Sam as he gets out, gathers his stuff, and goes around the side of the car. He leans down to look through Dean’s broken window.

“Call me if you find him?”

Dean nods once.

“And maybe I can meet up with you guys later, huh?”

“Yeah, all right,” Dean says dully.

Sam pats the car door twice. “Bye, Harley. Good seeing you again.”

“You too,” I say quietly. I watch Sam walk away.

Dean leans out of his window. “Sam?”

Sam turns back.

“You know, we made a hell of a team back there.”

Sam smiles sadly. “Yeah.”

He disappears inside the building and I can almost hear the drop Dean’s heart makes as he played the last card he had tucked away, to no avail.

I crawl over the front seat and sit cross-legged next to Dean. I know I have to be patient. Things are better between us now, he opens up more. I’ve just learned my lesson when it comes to _how_ he opens up to me. ‘Don’t think that just because I want to talk about it that Dean wants to talk about it too’ is Rule Number One. ‘Never pressure him’ is Rule Number Two. I’m still working on the rest of the Rules.

After a moment, Dean looks at me. His eyes are so sad. Now I wish he won’t talk to me because I don’t know how to comfort him when I understand both Dean and Sam’s side of the situation. He takes hold of my hand and gives it a weak squeeze. I scoot closer to him while he turns the car on and puts it into gear. Then he drives away, one hand draped over the steering wheel, one hand holding mine in his lap, and it’s the oddest thing because he doesn’t even turn the radio on.

A little while later, Dean glances at his watch. It’s something he rarely does in the car since there’s a clock on the dash, so I find it funny that he bothers with this action. Then I don’t find it so funny when he growls, “Son of a bitch,” under his breath and makes a violent U-turn in the middle of the road.

“Dean?”

“Sammy’s in trouble.” His eyes stay fixed on the road. He urges the car faster. The speedometer wobbles around one-twenty.

“What? How do you know?”

“My watch stopped when we left his apartment.” Dean slams his fist into the steering wheel. “It’s the demon.”

This time we don’t bother being sneaky and hiding in the alley; we go right to the front of the apartment. We race up the steps to the third floor, over to Sam’s place. Dean kicks down the door and calls out for Sam. There’s a bright yellow light coming from the bedroom.

“This way,” I say. A wave of scorching heat slaps me in the face when I turn the corner. Flames have already consumed more than half the room.

“No! Jess! No!” Sam shouts.

When my face and eyes adjust to the heat I see Sam lying on the bed, covering his face from the flames. Above him, a hot fire billows out from the ceiling, rolling over the walls, licking the wood and filling the room with its unnerving crackling.

In the center of the flames, immobilized against the ceiling, is Jessica. Her face is permanently twisted into a stricken look of fear, her arms and legs bent out in odd directions. The band of red around her abdomen grows wider as she bleeds out. My stomach lurches at the sight of her.

Dean recovers first. He grabs Sam off the bed, and it takes the both of us to wrestle him out of the burning apartment as he struggles against us, trying to get back to Jessica, screaming her name until he falls to his knees on the sidewalk.

Later that night, the three of us stand around the Impala parked across the street from the apartment complex, watching firemen run in and out of the building and policemen fight back gawking bystanders. The entire time I sit there, my eyes fixed on the same spot on the firetruck so it’s just a blur, I feel the heat from the fire on my face. There’s no way I’ll be able to get the image of Jessica burning on the ceiling out of mind. Or the agony on Sam’s face as he watched her burn.

A shotgun cocks behind me. I whip around and see Sam at the open trunk of the Impala, loading shotguns, his face set in a mask of desperate anger. Dean and I go over to him.

“Hey,” I say gently. “How are you doing?”

Sam looks down at me. He sighs and continues his work. “I’m fine.” He tosses the last shotgun on the pile and closes the trunk. “Come on. We’ve got work to do.”

I look at Dean. He stares at me, his jaw set. He got what he wanted. Sam decided to come with us. I just bet Dean didn’t think it would come at this high a price.


	8. Hell House

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My true first real speed bump, and something that bugs the hell out of me to this day but I don't have the brain power to edit, is that I made John send Harley, Sam and Dean to Richardson, Texas, where they encounter the Ghost Facers (before they were the Ghost Facers) and the Hell House. I freaking ADORE the Ghost Facers ("There's some salt in my duffel bag. Make a circle and get in." - "Inside the duffel bag?" - "Inside the salt, you idiot!") HAHA OH MY LORD they crack me up. But anyway, about a month after I finished the Hell House chapter I was like - CRAP, the whole episode was based on PRANKS. Sam and Dean pranking each other, the prank of the Hell House, etc. John would have never send them there. Oops. Let's just pretend that didn't happen, yeah? Lol.  
> This is my least favorite chapter, by the way.

After driving 3,000 miles across the United States, I never thought I would have to backtrack another 1,500 so soon. I’m all for helping the boys find their dad, but if Dean’s going to follow John blindly throughout the country, I hope John picks some locations that don’t have such a drastic amount of mileage between them.

We hung around Stanford for a while to see if we could find any leads on the demon that killed Jessica, but my hopes weren’t high since John’s been looking for twenty-two years with barely any luck. Sam was distraught when we came up empty. I really don’t know what he was expecting. Demons rarely leave a trail marked, “Hey, follow me!” Ever since then, he’s kept to the back seat of the Impala, intermittently sleeping for short periods of time and jerking awake. I know the feeling. It’s hard to sleep after a traumatizing incident, when the memories haunt your dreams and you start to question if your waking moments are actually reality.

Somewhere in New Mexico, Sam jolts awake yet again. I sit sideways against the newly repaired front window, so I see him as he sits up and rubs his eyes. Dean stops singing along to Foreigner’s _Dirty White Boy_ and looks at the rearview mirror, concerned.

“You okay?” he asks Sam.

Sam glances at us, then looks away, squinting in the light. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Another nightmare?” I ask him. Instead of answering, he clears his throat and occupies himself with the zipper on his jacket.

“You wanna drive for a while?” Dean offers, and this pulls a laugh out of Sam.

“Look, guys, you’re worried about me. I get it. And thank you, but I’m perfectly okay.” Sam tries to smile his way into mollifying us, but Dean’s the only one that can pull that off.

“Mm-hmm,” Dean mumbles.

Sam leans forward over the front seat. “You know what? Maybe we shouldn’t have left Stanford so soon.”

“Sam, we dug around there for a week,” I say as gently as I can. “We came up with nothing. If you want to track down the demon that killed Jessica–”

“We gotta find Dad first, I know.” Sam slumps back in the seat and stares out of his window. Dean and I look at each other helplessly.

Just after crossing the border into Texas we make a pit stop. Stretch our legs, get food, refill the gas tank. I try to get Dean to find a motel for the night so Sam can get a decent night’s sleep – and us as well – but he’s too eager to get to Richardson. He’s hoping he’ll find John there.

His eagerness runs out about two hours later when he passes a motel and pulls into the parking lot. Without saying a word he goes and gets a room, yawning the entire time. I shake my head, wondering if Dean will ever listen to me the first time around, and help Sam carry a few things inside.

Dean and I lay awake in bed that night for a long time, holding each other. I’m incredibly tired and I’m sure he is, too, but I can’t fall asleep. We don’t speak. I curl myself against his body and he rubs my shoulder. It’s strange that I feel like I miss him when he’s right here next to me. John going missing, Jessica’s death, it’s putting stress on all of us. I’m not looking forward to the straw that’s going to break the camel’s back. We need to find John, and fast.

Dean’s been on a Blue Öyster Cult binge since we passed Abilene, Texas. Three hours ago. I don’t even know where he found this many Blue Öyster Cult cassette tapes. All it took was him hearing _(Don’t Fear) The Reaper_ on the radio and _bam!_ Blue Öyster Cult afternoon.

I stretch out in the back of the Impala, reading a book. Dean plays drums on the steering wheel and sings _Fire of Unknown Origins_. Sam’s miraculously asleep, his head resting on the back of the seat and his mouth hanging open, snoring slightly. He had a restless night, just like Dean and I.

“Hey, Dean,” I whisper. “I know Sam’s asleep and all, but are you sure this is such a good song to be listening to?”

Dean frowns. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, come on.” I roll my eyes and say fast in a hushed voice, “‘ _Fire of unknown origins took my baby away’_? He just lost Jess in a fire.”

He spins the volume dial down. “Right.”

A few seconds later, just as the track changes to _Burnin’ For You_ , Dean looks at me through the rear view mirror. “Psst, Harley. Check this out,” he says quietly. He takes out the Blue Öyster Cult cassette and I get a bit of relief for a few minutes when he replaces it with a Motorhead one. After skipping forward to _Bomber_ , he feels around on the floor of the front seat and produces a plastic spoon. Gently, he places it in Sam’s open mouth. He grins at me while flipping open his phone. After snapping a quick picture of Sam, he turns the music up ear-splittingly loud and starts singing again, acting oblivious to the entire situation but still working hard to hide a smile.

Sam jerks awake. His eyes widen and he flails his arms around in a panic, trying to remove the spoon from his mouth before giving up and just spitting it out. He wipes his mouth and reaches over to turn the music back down. “Ha-ha, very funny.”

“Sorry, not a lot of scenery here in East Texas. Kinda gotta make your own,” Dean says. He throws me a wicked grin and I bury my nose in my book, snickering.

“Were you in on this?” Sam says, rounding on me.

“No!” I say quickly, holding up my hands, the book in one of them. “I’m just enjoying the show, Sam.”

Sam glowers at his brother. “Man, we’re not kids anymore, Dean. We’re not going to start that crap up again.” He takes it so personally, as if a spoon in his mouth would kill his ego, and I find that incredibly hilarious.

“Start what up?” Dean asks innocently.

“That prank stuff. It’s stupid, and it always escalates.” Sam’s hand touches the spoon that he spit out on the seat and he flicks it onto the floor, disgusted.

“Aw, what’s the matter, Sammy? Scared you’re going to get a little Nair in your shampoo again, huh?” Dean taunts him.

I lean forward on the front seat, between them, and wave my hand sheepishly. “That one actually was my idea.”

Sam scoffs. “You weren’t even there when that happened!”

“I know, but it was still my idea.” I sit back in my seat. “Dean and I kept in touch for a while after our dads stopped meeting up as much. He had asked for prank ideas one time.”

“So you suggested Nair?” Sam cries.

I shrug. “You broke my Donatello Ninja Turtle action figure.”

Sam stares at me, fuming. “All right, just remember, you started it this time,” he says, pointing an accusatory finger at Dean.

“Oh-ho, bring it on, baldy,” Dean says, chuckling.

I giggle and return to my book.

“Why’d you let me fall asleep, anyway?” Sam asks Dean. “You know how I feel about sleeping right now.” His nightmares must be really bad.

“’Cause I’m an awesome brother,” Dean says. “So what did you dream about?”

“Lollipops and candy canes,” Sam says dryly.

“You know, sooner or later we’re gonna have to talk about this,” Dean says. Sam’s not exactly an open diary, but he’s not Dean, either. For him to keep his feelings bottled up so tightly isn’t like him.

“After that prank stuff you pulled? No thanks.” Sam turns around quickly and tells me, “You’re on sleep patrol next time.”

“What if we’re at a motel?” I ask.

He thinks for a minute. “Just in the car.” He looks around and asks grumpily, “Where are we, anyway?”

“A few hours outside of Richardson,” Dean says in a game show-host voice. “Give me the lowdown again?”

Sam digs through the backpack at his feet and pulls out their Dad’s journal and a piece of paper. He skims through it before saying, “All right, about a month ago a group of kids go poking around this local haunted house.”

“Haunted by what?” I ask.

“Apparently, a pretty misogynistic spirit,” Sam says, referencing the journal. “Legend goes, it takes girls and strings them up in the rafters.”

“Better watch out, Harley,” Dean says.

I reach forward and punch him in the arm. “Not like I couldn’t take the bastard.”

“Anyway,” Sam says, eyeing us, “These kids see this dead girl hanging in the cellar.”

“Anybody ID the corpse?” Dean asks.

“Well, that’s the thing. By the time the cops got there the body was gone. So cops are saying the kids were just yanking chains.”

“Maybe the cops are right,” I say.

“What’s the matter? Scared of a haunted house?” Dean taunts. I raise my fist again and he cringes. “All right, all right, all right.”

“I read a couple of the kids’ firsthand accounts,” Sam continues, pretending he was never interrupted. “They seemed pretty sincere.”

“Where’d you read these ‘accounts’?” Dean asks.

Sam fiddles with the corner of the piece of paper. At first, he speaks slowly, embarrassed. “Well, I surfed some local…” He looks away and says quickly, “Paranormal websites.” He clears his throat and adds, “And I found one.”

“And what’s it called?” Dean asks with a raised eyebrow.

With the same embarrassment, Sam admits, “Hell Hounds Lair dot com.”

“Let me guess, streaming live out of Mom’s basement?” I say.

Sam grins. “Yeah, probably.”

“Most of those websites wouldn’t know a ghost if it bit ’em in the pursqueeter,” Dean grumbles. “I doubt any of it’s real.”

“Look, Dad sent us here for a reason. There’s got to be something worth checking out.” It’s odd to have Sam fighting for John’s cause instead of the other way around. I wonder if it’s really for John, though. Maybe he just wants to hurry up and find the next clue in the chase of his dad. He’s tied into this crusade now even more than Dean is. John and Sam both lost someone they loved to the demon.

But what do I know?

“All right,” Dean says. “So where do we find these kids?”

“Same place you always find kids in a town like this,” Sam says.

I don’t know what Sam means until we reach the town. Then I realize, oh, there’s all of two places for people to really hang out at. The bar, and the fast food outlet. I was stereotypically expecting kids in jeans and cowboy boots, but there’s just regular teenagers in here dressed as normally as us. The fact that we all wear jeans and boots and Dean and I like leather jackets and the majority of Sam’s wardrobe consists of plaid button-up shirts helps us blend in as well. Sam points to a table where two boys and a girl sit, drinking milkshakes.

We introduce ourselves as reporters and sit down across from Kat, Jeremy and Ben. Kat looks a little ditzy, with her big, poofed up blond hair and jean jacket, and she sits too close to chubby Ben, who doesn’t seem to mind, although Jeremy does. He pulls at his black hair the entire time we talk. Or rather, the entire time _they_ talk. And man, do they talk. All Dean asked was “What happened”. Not what happened _where_ , just simply what happened, and it’s like he broke through a damn floodgate. They all rushed to give their account of the story at the same exact time.

“It was the scariest thing I ever saw in my life, I swear to God,” Ben says.

Jeremy nods eagerly. “From the moment we walked in the walls were painted black.”

“Red,” Ben corrects him.

“I think it was blood,” Kat says capriciously, examining her nails.

“All these freaky symbols–”

“Crosses and stars and–”

“Pentagons–”

“ _Pentecostals_ –”

“Whatever, I had my eyes closed the whole time.”

“But I can damn sure tell you this much, no matter what anybody else says–”

“That poor girl–”

“With the black–”

“Blond–”

“Red hair, just hanging there–”

“Kicking!”

“Without even moving!”

“She was real.”

“One hundred percent.”

“And kinda hot. Well, you know, in a dead sort of way–”

“Okay!” Dean says loudly, slamming his palms on the table to cut them off. He looks at me, his eyes wide, and mouths, “Oh, my God.”

“And…how’d you find out about this place?” Sam asks hesitantly, almost afraid of the response.

Finally, we get a simple answer from the three of them: “Craig.”

“And where can we find Craig?” I ask.

“He works at the music shop on Canal Street,” Kat says with a dreamy look in her eyes.

“Canal Street it is,” Dean says, and he’s out of his seat and at the door before Sam has the chance to politely excuse us.

The music shop is completely empty save for a young guy with curly blond hair and a bright Hawaiian print t-shirt sitting behind the counter. Dean turns and walks on the other side of a row of records, casually flipping through them, picking up Kansas’ “Point of Know Return” for better inspection. I recognize the slip cover before I glance around the shop, which I kind of have to appreciate. There’s signed guitars and band t-shirts hanging on the walls interspersed between a variety of posters and framed records. It’s got a real homey feel to the place.

“Can I help you with anything?” Hawaii 5-0 says.

“Yeah, are you Craig Thurston?” Sam asks.

“I am.”

“We’re reporters with the Dallas Morning News,” I say. “I’m Harley. This is Dean and Sam.”

“No way,” Craig says, his face brightening. He leans over the counter. Looks me up and down with a favorable gleam in his eye. “I’m a writer, too. I write for my school’s lit magazine.”

“Good for you, Morrison,” Dean snaps, coming up beside me with his chest puffed out and chin held high. I get a warm, fuzzy feeling at the thought of Dean getting jealous.

“Umm…” Sam says uncomfortably. “Okay. We’re doing an article on local hauntings, and rumor has it you might know of one.”

Craig pulls his brows together. “You mean the Hell House?”

“That’s the one,” Dean says.

“I didn’t think there was anything to the story,” Craig says with a casual shrug.

“Why don’t you tell us the story,” I offer, and Craig beams.

“Well, supposedly, back in the thirties, this farmer, Mordechai Murdoch, used to live in this house with his six daughters. It was during the Depression. His crops were failing, he didn’t have enough money to feed his own children. So, I guess that’s when he went off the deep end.”

He pauses dramatically, waiting for us to pursue his story. Sam takes the bait.

“How?”

“He figured it was best if his girls died quick, rather than starve to death,” Craig continues, hardly missing a beat. “So he attacked them. They screamed, begged for him to stop. But he just strung ’em up, one after the other. And when he was all finished he just turned around and hung himself. Now they say that his spirit is trapped in the house forever, stringing up any other girl that goes inside.” Craig wiggles his eyebrows at me. I frown at him.

“Where’d you hear all this?” Dean asks, his frown matching mine.

“My cousin Dana told me,” Craig says. “I don’t know where she heard it from. You gotta realize, I – I didn’t believe this for a second.”

“But now you do,” Sam says.

Craig throws his hands out helplessly. “I don’t know what the hell to think, man. I’ll tell you exactly what I told the police, okay? That girl was real. And she was dead. This was not a prank. I swear to God, I don’t wanna go anywhere near that house ever again, okay?”

“Okay,” I say. “Thanks for your time.”

We step back out into the bright Texas sun and Dean mocks, “ _Thanks for your time_. Jeeze. We should get that tattooed to our foreheads.” He slams the Impala door shut after we get in. “I can’t believe Dad has us following this crap.”

“There must be a reason for it,” I say. I’m all too familiar with John’s sporadic tactics, having fallen victim to a few of them myself the past two years. “It can’t hurt to check out the Hell House.”

“Ugh, don’t call it that,” Dean says as he starts the car. “Fine, we’ll go.”

A few miles outside of town, Dean parks the Impala just off the main road and we trek the half-mile muddy path up to a lone, run down cabin perched on a slight mound of a hill. Out here, the clouds are thick and grey. There’s a sparse collection of trees along the path but behind the cabin there’s nothing around for miles.

“Can’t say I blame the kid for not wanting to come back here,” Sam says, squinting up at the cabin.

“Yeah,” Dean agrees. “So much for _Curb Appeal_.” Sam raises an eyebrow at Dean. “What? Can’t a guy enjoy a nice home improvement reality show once in a while?”

“Come on, guys,” I call.

“What’s that?” Sam asks, eyeing the device Dean just pulled out of his pocket.

“It’s an EMF meter. Reads electromagnetic frequencies,” Dean says, frowning. Like Sam wouldn’t know.

“Yeah, I know what an EMF meter is, but why does that one look like a busted up Walkman?”

Dean grins. “’Cause that’s what I made it out of.”

Sam’s mouth pulls down in the corner in an unamused smirk. “I can see that.” Dean’s grin fades. He sticks his tongue out at Sam and moves away from him.

We spend the next ten minutes or so examining the outside of the cabin. Sam trips over a vine next to a pile of old, rotting chopped wood. I cut my finger on a broken glass window. Dean smacks the hell out of his EMF reader as it makes unhappy warbling noises. Oh, yeah. It’s going to be a fine day.

“You got something?” I ask Dean when I see him holding the EMF up to the sky.

“Yup. The EMF’s no good.”

“Why?” I walk over to him. Sam joins us.

Dean gestures to the power lines running overhead, an oddity in this area seeing as nobody’s lived here during a time when electricity would have been brought all the way out to the boon docks. “I think that thing’s still got a little juice in it. It’s screwing with all the readings.”

Sam looks around. “Yeah, that would do it.”

“Come on, let’s go.” Dean puts the EMF in his leather jacket pocket and leads Sam and I into the cabin.

The inside of the Hell House looks just as run down as the outside. The log walls are flaking and forming small wood piles on the ground, mixing with the mortar chipping off around the stone. Shredded sheets attempt to cover the broken glass windows. There’s no furniture, but if there was I’m sure it would look like the doors and stairwell – black with soot, aged and cracked.

In what I assume would be the living room, chicken feet have been tacked up above each door. Freshly melted candles line the mantle and a few stray ones are set around various places. Besides the candles, the other signs that people have been here recently sprucing up the place are the symbols on the cracking concrete walls. Just a few, in alternating red and black paint. An encircled cross with horizontal and vertical lines at the edges, a long inverted cross, something that just looks like a bunch of squiggly lines. A large pentagram also dominates most of the floor.

Dean lets out a low whistle. “Looks like old man Murdock here was a bit of a tagger in his time,” he jokes.

Sam steps forward, snapping pictures of all the symbols. “After his time, too.” He points to the red cross. “That reverse cross has been used by Satanists for centuries, but this sigil of sulfur–” he points to the black circled cross “–didn’t show up in San Francisco until the sixties.”

“Oh, College Boy thinks he’s so smart,” Dean grumbles. He goes over to the staircase, where I examine another symbol painted on the wall under the stairs. It’s a dot surrounded by four lines, and the bottom stroke looks like an upside-down question mark.

“You see this one before?” Dean asks me, pointing to the question mark.

“No, but it looks familiar, doesn’t it?” I say.

“I’ve seen it. Somewhere,” Dean says quietly. “What about you, College Boy?”

“No.” Sam comes over and gingerly brushes his fingers over the symbol. “It’s paint. Seems pretty fresh, too.”

“Freshly painted symbols, new candles, a dead girl that no one can find…” I shake my head. “I’d side with Dean and say this is all probably just a prank if your dad didn’t send us here.”

“That’s what’s making this all the more frustrating,” Dean grumbles.

A loud noise and hushed voices from the next room put us all on alert. As if in one mind, the three of us speed noiselessly across the dirty wood floors and take up positions on either side of a black door. Dean nods to Sam and I, then busts through the door. Sam and I follow, and we’re all immediately blinded by a bright light.

“Oh, cut!” someone shouts. The light shuts off. “It’s just a couple of humans.” The guy that spoke, a short young man with dirty blond locks, a holey blue jacket and muddy jeans, shuts off a video camera. The other guy, wearing equally muddy pants and an extremely nerdy tan vest with pens stuck in all the pockets, clicks off a small hand-held gadget.

“What are you guys doing here?” Mr. Cameraman asks us angrily. Defensively.

“What the hell are _you_ doing here?” Dean counters, his loud voice booming around the dirty kitchen and making the two guys retreat a step.

Mr. Cameraman recovers, pushing his glasses back up his nose, and chuckles. “We belong here. We’re professionals?” he says, as if we’re supposed to pick that up from their puffed-up superiority, the camera, and the amount of junk gear they’ve got piled on the broken countertop.

“Professional what?” I ask.

“Paranormal investigators,” Cameraman says smoothly, and produces three business cards from his pocket, which he holds out in a fan for us in a faux display of humility. “There you go, take a look at that.”

Dean snatches a card. “Oh, you gotta be kidding me.”

“Ed Zeddmore and Harry Spangler?” Sam says, reading from his card. He rolls his eyes and sighs. “Hell Hounds Lair dot com. You guys run that website.”

“Yeah,” Mister Cameraman a.k.a. Ed Zeddmore says proudly.

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, we’re _huge_ fans,” Dean says sarcastically, walking past our new paranormal investigator friends to check out the filthy sink full of rust and ring stains.

“And, uh, we know who you guys are, too,” Ed says with a knowing grin on his face.

“Oh yeah?” I venture carefully.

“Amateurs,” Ed says, again acting as if it were blatantly obvious. Dean immediately loses interest and opens up a mildew-y cabinet to reveal a ton of spider webs and another candle. “Looking for ghosts and cheap thrills.”

The other investigator, Harry, finally speaks. “Yep. So if you guys don’t mind, we’re trying to conduct a serious scientific investigation here.”

“Yeah, what have you got so far?” Dean asks, slamming the cabinet shut and making Ed and Harry jolt in fright.

Ed turns to his partner. “Harry, why don’t you tell ’em about EMF?”

“Well,” Harry says, jumping at the opportunity to show off but then calming down after he picks up an EMF reader that looks incredibly fancier than Dean’s. Wouldn’t want to seem too zealous. I look over at Dean and he makes a face.

Sam plays dumb and tries to hide a smile. “EMF?” he asks gullibly.

“Electromagnetic field?” Harry says. He tries to be cool but his race to show off is really noticeable. “Spectral entities can cause energy fluctuations that can be read with an EMF detector. Like this bad boy right here.” He turns on his EMF and it starts warbling, a more pleasant sound than the one Dean’s was making outside. “Whoa, whoa. It’s two-point-eight mg.”

Ed takes the reader from Harry. “Two-point-eight. It’s hot in here!”

Dean whistles in sarcastic admiration and I say, just as sarcastically, “Wow.”

“So, you guys ever really seen a ghost before?” Sam asks them.

“Once,” Ed says proudly. “We were, uh, we were investigating this old house and we saw a vase fall right off the table.”

“By itself,” Harry interjects.

Ed’s face falls. “Well, we…we, we didn’t actually _see_ it,” he stammers, his cheeks flushing. “We heard it. Something like that, though, it changes you,” he adds portentously.

“Yeah, I think I get the picture,” Dean says. “We should go, let them get back to work.”

“Yeah, you should,” Ed says. As we leave, Ed adds snidely to Harry, “Yeah, work. I’m sorry, man. That pot we smoked gave me the giggles.”

“Dammit!” Dean yells when we’re outside. Sam and I stay a safe distance away while Dean stomps out his anger on the trail, sending mud splattering everywhere. “Stupid – fucking – shit!” He spins around and points at us. “You know what? I think I know why Dad sent us here.”

“Why?” Sam and I ask together. He asks cautiously. I ask accusingly.

“To take care of those sorry bastards!” Dean jabs his finger back at the Hell House.

“Look, as pleasant as that sounds, Dean, I’m sure John thought this Mordechai deal was something big,” I say. Dean throws his hands out and we walk the rest of the way to the car in silence.

“We can’t give up yet,” Sam says when we’re back in town. “I’ll hit the library and try to see if I can find anything on Mordechai.” He eyes Dean with a slight tilt of his head. “Um, if you want, I can drop you guys off at a motel. You can get a room while I do some research, since it will be dark soon. Maybe you can also do a missing persons search for the dead girl while you’re at it?”

“Sure, whatever,” Dean says distractedly.

Ten minutes later, Dean hands Sam the keys to the Impala in front of some western-themed motel and we watch Sam drive off.

“You know,” I say slowly. “Sam takes forever to do research. He likes to be thorough.” It takes all of half a second for that to register in Dean’s brain before he pushes me back against our motel room door and kisses my neck. “Wait, Dean, get inside the room first.”

He fumbles with the lock on a green door with a giant wood cow head in the center of it, cursing it when it doesn’t give way. Finally, he shoves it open and drags me inside.

“Whoa,” he says.

“I know. Looks like _The Wild Wild West_ threw up in here.”

It’s like the Texans wanted to make sure that their guests knew they were in Texas. A giant adobe mission canvas tacked to the wall behind the bed, cowhide comforters, two sets of long-horns mounted above each bed. There’s even an armadillo statue on the table and on a small dresser next to the bathroom, underneath a giant canvas painting of a horse – with its ass in profile.

He kicks the door shut with his foot and stalks over to me. “It’s been too long,” he groans into my neck, his hot breath tickling my skin. I take his face in my hands and kiss him deeply.

Dean pulls off my denim jacket and lifts my shirt over my head. I push his leather jacket off his shoulders, then a thin, worn out jean jacket, then a long sleeve button up, and then I pull off a gray t-shirt.

“Damn, why do you have to wear so many layers?” I complain, and he just laughs.

We roll around on one of the beds, kissing, fighting over who gets to be on top. I’m surprised that most of this time is taken up by simply kissing, our lips exploring practically every inch of the other’s body. A body I’m all too familiar with but still feels like the first time whenever I’m with him. It really has been too long.

When we’re done, we lay on our backs. There’s nothing covering us but our own naked bodies since we managed to kick off the comforter, top sheet, and both pillows. The cool breeze from the old, noisy A/C unit in the window feels good over my sweaty skin.

Then, I think of Sam at the library and the task we’re supposed to be doing and I groan. “We should call the police station,” I say unenthusiastically.

“Not ‘we’,” he says. “Go on ahead. I’m staying right here. I’m over this bull.”

“Fine,” I say. I crawl out of bed and sit at the table with my laptop and my phone, not even bothering to get dressed. I’m sort of with Dean on this one, but when Sam comes back with information that he’s sure to find, I can’t have the only thing Dean and I accomplish be sex.

I find access to the Texas police database and simultaneously call the local PD. While I talk and type, I sit back in the chair with my legs crossed. The entire time, and I mean the _entire_ time, Dean lays on the bed and stares at me with a sort of hungry look in his eyes and a smirk on his face. And the longer he stares, the more I see that he’s ready for round two.

“You should do your investigating naked more often,” Dean says after I hang up the phone. “It’s sexy.”

“Ha-ha,” I sniff.

“So you didn’t find anything?” he asks.

“You know very well that I didn’t,” I say, closing my laptop and striding back over to the bed. “You were listening to me the entire time.”

“Yeah, I was listening, but I wasn’t paying attention,” he says with a grin. “I had something way better to focus on.”

I get up on the bed and straddle Dean, leaning over to kiss him along his jaw and down his neck. “Hmm, okay. I guess I can forgive you,” I murmur. He brings his heels up on the bed to rub himself against my butt. I flex my hips, allowing him to slip inside me. Dean pulls me to him for a kiss, moves his hips into mine as I do the same.

The motel door opens.

“Oh, jeeze!”

My head whips around to see Sam at the door, moving slightly from side to side, hands halfway to his head, not sure which way to turn. A split second after I see him, Dean rolls over and shields me with his body. “Dude!”

“Jeeze!” Sam says again, and slams the door shut behind him.

“So, I think we’re done,” I say, scrambling off the bed to search for my clothes.

“Yeah, yep.” Dean pulls on his jeans and goes to the door. As I dress, I hear him talking to Sam outside. “Hey, man, sorry about that–”

“Seriously, Dean? You couldn’t give me just a little heads up? Or even lock the damn door?”

I yank my shirt over my head and run to the door before the boys start a bloodbath in the parking lot. “Heeey, Sammy,” I say, casually leaning against the doorframe. “Find anything at the library?”

Sam storms past me, fuming, and sits down at the table. “I couldn’t find a Mordechai, but I did find a Martin Murdock who lived in that house in the thirties. He did have children, but only two of them. Both boys. And there’s no evidence that he ever killed anyone.” He continues to glare at us.

“Huh.” Dean scratches his head. He really wants to shout out, _I told you so!_ , but he sort of has no right after Sam caught us, well, not working.

“What about you?” Sam says. “Or did you even get around to your half of the deal?”

“I hit up the police station,” I say. “And the Texas PD database. Those kids didn’t really give a clear description of the dead girl but regardless, there’s no matching missing persons. It’s like she never existed.”

“Come on, we did our digging. At least for tonight,” Dean says. “For all we know, those Hell Hound boys made up the whole thing. And if they didn’t, we’ll just keep an ear out in case any ghosties or ghoulies or big scary beasties murder more villagers.”

Sam sighs dejectedly. “Yeah, all right.”

“I say we find ourselves a bar and some beers and leave the legend to the locals.”

“I don’t know, Dean,” I say hesitantly. “I’d back you up one hundred percent if your dad hadn’t directed us here. There’s got to be _something_ going on.”

“Look, Harley,” Dean says sweetly as he rests his hands on my shoulders, his face inches from mine. “Dad’s had good leads to a bunch of cases that turned out to be a crap shoot before. I don’t wanna fight you on this, all right? I want a cold beer, a chance to relax, and maybe the opportunity to finally beat you at darts. _Capiche_?”

“Yeah, all right…”

On the way to the car, Sam holds his hand out ever so slightly to stop me from opening the door, since we get in on the same side. I look at him quizzically.

Dean gets in, turns the key in the ignition and receives a blast of Latino pop-dance music instead of the typical classic rock he listens to. Dean jumps lets out a small shriek. He fumbles to turn the car off, instead turning the windshield wipers on.

He yanks the key out of the ignition, silencing everything, and Sam allows me to get in. I climb in the back and he slides in the front, laughing, and licks his finger quickly to mark an imaginary 1 in the air, then points to himself.

Dean shoots him a dirty look. “That’s all you got? Weak. That is bush league.” But he’s still careful as he restarts the car.

All the way to the bar I think, I missed out on the pranking when we were younger and now it seems to be just another Sam-Dean thing. I don’t exactly want them to do stuff to me now, either, because they’re a lot smarter. But I wonder if I could mess with their heads, make them think they’re pranking each other while I stay on the sidelines and enjoy the show.

That means I have to come up with something now, at the bar. I wrack my brain, thinking, as Dean parks, as we get out of the car, as we walk inside. Then–

“Why don’t you boys find a table? I’ll get the beers,” I say.

“All right,” Dean says.

“Sure.” Sam shrugs.

They walk away into the crowd. To my left, a couple vacates a tall two-person table. As I pass it on the way to the bartender, I snag the salt shaker. What I have in mind can be done one of two ways. I can douse Sam and Dean’s beer with salt and challenge them to downing it, but I run the risk of the salt reacting with the carbonation. Or, I can get shots along with the beer and fill those with salt. I would have to get something with dark liquid because the salt won’t dissolve, and with the glasses being smaller, I’m sure the boys would notice. I get to the bar, my mind swirling with choices, and order three beers and three Jägermeister shots on impulse.

“Got some help with you?” the bartender asks as he sets the six glasses on the counter.

I stare at the glasses and tuck the salt shaker in my back pocket. “Um, do you mind if I borrow a tray?”

The guy gives me a funny look but hands me one anyway. I load the drinks on it and make my way slowly through the crowded bar. I love that Dean and Sam like to sit in the back of things. That gives me time to – miraculously – balance the tray on one hand and unscrew the salt shaker lid with the other. I pour salt into two Jäeger’s and leave the near-empty shaker on a table as I pass.

“All right, guys, shots! Drink up!” I shove the salted Jaeger’s into their hands and take my own, trying to avoid giving them the chance to look at what they’re drinking. We clink glasses, and just as I throw the dark liquid back in my throat I realize they’re going to know it was me. I didn’t give either of them time to leave the other person unattended with their drink. Fuck. I set my empty glass down on the table and see Sam and Dean nearly in tears.

“Oh, God.” Dean gags and makes a grab for his beer. Sam does the same and they chug down half of it. I sip on mine, staring innocuously around the room.

“Sorry, do you guys not like Jägermeister?” I ask innocently. “I can get something different next time.”

“Not cool. You’re so dead, Harley,” Sam snaps. Dean nods vigorously in agreement.

“We’ll see,” I mutter into my beer.

Frustrated, Sam throws himself back into his seat, channeling his anger into something else. Most likely for my sake. “Why are we still even here?”

“We’re having a drink,” Dean says. He looks at me pointedly and adds, “I’d say enjoying a drink, but I don’t think I’ll be able to look a Jäeger in the face again.”

I grin mischievously.

“That’s not what I mean.” Sam straightens up in his seat. “Why did Dad send us on this crap job? We went to Jericho because Dad was supposed to be there. Then he leads us here. And obviously, he’s not here. So why are we?”

“I still say there’s something going on.” I shrug. “There was in Jericho.”

Dean sighs heavily. “Maybe there _is_ something going on,” he admits reluctantly. “We just aren’t seeing it.”

“What?” Sam scoffs. “Why the sudden change of heart, Dean? You we’re ready to high-tail it out of Texas, ‘leave the legend to the locals’, a half hour ago! We know Dad’s not here. He would have left us a message and not just coordinates to some crap job if he were.”

There’s silence as Dean and I meet gazes. I try to read his thoughts through the expression on his face. Dean may run his mouth and act like he’s all hot and bothered by a lack of supernatural trail, but really, I think we’re still here because John thinks there’s something here, and we just haven’t found it yet. Dean’s agitated because he’s not as quick to get down to the dirty details as his dad is.

“Tell you the truth, I don’t think Dad’s ever been to Richardson,” Dean finally says.

“Then let’s go. Go find Dad,” Sam says eagerly.

“We can’t leave until we finish the job,” I say quietly.

Sam slumps back in his seat again, grinding his teeth. “We don’t even know that there is a job here anymore! What’s more important, finding Dad or chasing ghost stories?”

Dean pulls his brows together and plops John’s journal on the table, all business. He hangs onto that thing like a priest with a Bible. “We’re not chasing ghost stories. We’re finishing a job.” He jabs his finger onto the cover. “This book. This is Dad’s single most valuable possession. Everything he knows about every evil thing is in here. And he’s passed it on to us. I think he wants us to pick up where he left off. You know, saving people. Hunting things. The family business.”

Sam shakes his head. “That makes no sense. Why doesn’t he just call us? Why doesn’t he just tell us what he wants, tell us where he is?”

“I don’t know. But the way I see it, Dad’s giving us a job to do, and I intend to do it.”

Dean’s loyalty to his father goes bone-deep. It stops somewhere around Sam’s subcutaneous skin.

“Dean…no. I need to find Dad. I need to find Jessica’s killer. It’s the only thing I can think about.” He looks away, lowering his eyes.

Through all the pranks, the research, doing what he came here to do, Sam’s grieving. I forget about that sometimes because, honestly, it didn’t happen to me. I didn’t lose someone, at least not recently. And it’s the most awful way for me to think.

“Okay, all right, Sam,” I say. “We’ll find them. I promise. Listen to me.” I wait until Sam’s head reluctantly turns back. “You’ve gotta prepare yourself. This search could take a while, and all that anger, you can’t keep it burning over the long haul. It’s going to kill you. You need to have patience, Sam.” He looks at me with wide eyes, as if he’s shocked to find that I know how angry he is. That I hear him call out Jessica’s name in the middle of the night or leave the room before sunrise to go for a run. That I see the small bruises on his knuckles from where he punches trees. That, yes, I can hear his raging yell when he thinks he’s far enough away from the motel.

He looks down shamefully. “How do you do it?” He looks back up, just at Dean this time. “How does Dad do it?”

I know what he means, though. He wants to know, after all these years, how both Dean and John can go out there with such a vengeance after losing their mom the same way he lost Jessica. He wants something to hold on to, something to carry him through this.

Then I realize, Sam doesn’t know about my pain either. He doesn’t know about what happened with my dad two years ago, or that I confessed to Dean what I did to my little brother and ultimately my mom. I’ve struggled with things for years, too. It was easy to feel better when I would spend time with Sam and Dean as kids, which is why I was able to convince myself that I was okay for so long. But I don’t stop to let myself think. I can’t let those thoughts invade my head or I’ll be so consumed by them I’ll lose all function. I always thought I was more like Dean. Hardheaded. Focused on the job at hand. Would prefer not to talk about feelings. In this situation though, I may be more like Sam. And if he’s anything like me, he’s going to need all the support he can get. It’s what I never had and possibly what I required the most.

Dean can only shrug. “I mean, I figure our family’s so screwed to hell, maybe we can help some others. Make things a little more bearable.” While helping others, doing this for the greater good, helped me, it doesn’t seem to satisfy Sam. Dean leans a little bit closer. “I’ll tell you what else helps. Killing as many evil sons of bitches as I possibly can.”

This brings out a small smile from Sam.

“You know we’re going to find your dad, right?” I say.

“Yeah,” Sam says, as if he’s just beginning to believe it himself.

Despite my prank earlier, Dean still finds it somewhere in his heart to hold me later that night. He probably considers us to have unfinished business due to being interrupted earlier, and he tries to start something quietly after he thinks Sam is asleep, but we have to stop once Sam growls, “I can hear you.”

The next morning, Sam wakes Dean and I up before dawn. He’s fully dressed and there’s three coffees to-go on the table.

“We need to go, guys,” he says quietly.

Dean and I sit up in bed. “What’s going on, Sammy?” Dean asks.

“There’s been another murder at the Hell House. They have a body this time.”

After close and careful examination of the coffee cup, I determine it to be just regular coffee and not altered in some way for a prank. On the way out of town, Sam tells us that he had gone out early and heard about the girl’s death at the coffee shop. It turns out John was right after all. What a surprise.

Dawn breaks by the time we reach the Hell House. We leave the Impala in the same spot as last time and trek down the muddy path. A few emergency vehicles are parked around the cabin. Two men dressed in dark blue onesies emerge from the front door with a long black bag on a stretcher. They roll it over to the coroner’s van and load the dead girl’s body into it.

We approach a bystander. There’s a surprising amount of them for being the Hell House is so far out of reach.

“What happened?” Dean asks the man.

“Some cops say a girl hung herself in the house,” he says.

“Suicide?” Sam says, confused.

“Yeah. She was a straight-A student. Full ride to UT, too. It just doesn’t make sense.” The man walks away, shaking his head solemnly.

Sam glances at us. “What do you think?”

Dean looks around. “I think maybe we missed something,” he admits.

The only thing we can do in the meantime is hang around in town until the crime scene clears because we need to get back inside the Hell House. We walk around downtown and find a place for breakfast. Dean and I team up, just this once, and mix up the cheese powder from a box of Macaroni and Cheese with a glass of cold water, and replace Sam’s orange juice with it while he’s in the bathroom. Sam is halfway through his second gulp before he spits it back into his glass and moves his food to another table without so much as a second glance.

“Okay, now I feel bad,” I say to Dean in a low voice.

“Sammy’s a big boy. He can handle it,” he says, letting his laughter trail off.

“Are you sure this prank stuff is a good idea so soon after he lost Jessica?” I ask. “I mean, I know if I lost you, I’d cut off anyone’s hand that tried to give me liquid cheese to drink while I was feeling down.”

“I believe that, too. I guess I just thought Sam would need some cheering up.”

“He needs _time_ , not pranks.”

“All right. I’ll tone it down. Give him a chance to open up first. But you gotta admit, the pranks are fun.”

Reluctantly, I grin. “Yeah, they are. Especially when they aren’t happening to me.”

Dean wiggles his eyebrows as if to say, _Be afraid._

We wander around aimlessly until past midday. After a late lunch, we shoot pool in a bar. Dean and I hustle some money out of a couple college kids who think they’re the last word in bar games while Sam watches disapprovingly from the corner. Sam may hate it, but we carry out a couple hundred dollars and feel just fine about the way we make a living.

Later that night, Dean goes to take a shower before we head out to the Hell House and emerges, seething, wrapped in a towel with splotches of his skin and his entire face tinted blue. Sam and I laugh until we’re in tears.

“Yeah, laugh it up,” Dean growls.

“Look, Sam, we get a private performance from the newest member of the Blue Man Group,” I say as I wipe tears out of the corner of my eyes.

“You know, Harley, that shower was meant for you,” Sam tells me cheerfully.

My laughter dies immediately and my lips form a small O.

Night finally falls. We avoid the trails, which are still unbelievably muddy despite the lack of rain or water, and make our way to the Hell House through the trees. Crouching in the bushes just out of view, we take in our surroundings. A police car parked next to the cabin, two cops pacing in front of it. I think we’ll manage.

“I guess the cops don’t want anyone else screwing around in there,” Sam whispers.

“Yeah, but _we_ still have to get in there,” I whisper back.

To our right, leaves and bushes rustle loudly. Voices whisper and hush each other, and then two familiar heads pop into view above the brush. They step out in a slow fashion that I assume is supposed to be quietly stalking but they manage to snap branches and crunch leaves as they move, hunched over, wearing all sorts of gadgets on their backs that give them a sort of disfigured look.

“I don’t believe it,” Dean whispers. He turns to Sam and I, a mischievous smirk on his face. “I got an idea.” He rises slightly – much quieter than the two boneheads over there – and cups his hands around his mouth to yell out, “Who ya gonna call!”

Ed and Harry spin around and knock into each other, frightened. Dean’s voice caught the attention of the cops, who run after Dumb and Dumber calling, “Freeze! Get back here!” The four of them disappear down the muddy path.

Laughing, we make a break for the cabin. The ammo bag bounces noisily on Sam’s back as we run. Once inside the front door, he slings it off his shoulder and breaks out loaded rifles, distributing one to each of us. Sam and I packed shells with rock salt earlier while Dean was in the shower unknowingly turning himself blue.

Dean turns on a flashlight and goes over to the upside-down question mark symbol from earlier. “Where have I seen that symbol before? It’s killing me!”

“Come on, we don’t have much time,” I say.

“Hey,” Sam says, touching my arm. I look up at him. He’s got to be at least four inches taller than Dean, which doesn’t seem like much, but Dean already reaches six feet. “I’m not trying to undermine your skills or anything, but if this Mordechai is really after women…well, just stay close, okay?”

I smile. “Thanks, Sam.”

“What are you two chit-chatting about? Let’s go,” Dean gripes. He holds open the door to the basement. Sam goes down first, I follow, and Dean brings up the rear. The upstairs was void of furniture and now I know why. All the junk is crammed down here. Broken chairs, an old table, shelves lined with dirty glass jars. Dean spies the jars and picks one up for a closer look. The pale red liquid sloshes around inside. “Hey, Sam. I dare you to take a swig of this.”

“Ugh,” I groan, and walk off to examine another part of the basement.

“The hell would I do that for?” I hear Sam say.

Then, after a pause, Dean comes back with: “I double dare you.” Those are my boys. Annoying. Immature. In a dangerous atmosphere and their blood is barely racing. The thought of drinking disgusting slop is more repugnant than facing a spirit or monster.

I come across a cabinet. From behind the old wood doors, I hear a faint scratching and definitely some movement. Then, something loud moves inside, loud enough for Sam and Dean to hear, and they’re at my side in an instant. Dean holds his flashlight and gun up to the cabinet. At his OK, I open the door. A small pack of rats pile out and squeak across the floor, scurrying from the light. Dean hops from one foot to the other.

“Arghh! I hate rats!”

“Would you rather it be a ghost?” I point out.

“Yes,” he says obviously.

“Uh, guys.” Sam stares beyond Dean and I. “You got your ghost.” We turn to look.

Mordechai steps out of the shadows, looking very solid for a ghost, in ratty overalls and a rotting black hat. He swings an axe around in his pale hands and raises it above his head. I lift my rifle and fire twice. The rounds hit him in the stomach, but Mordechai still advances, his scraggly beard moving eerily as his mouth forms a growl. I back away, letting Sam take my spot, because I need to reload the gun. Dean shoots Mordechai one more time, though, and he mists away.

“What the hell kind of spirit is immune to rock salt?” Sam demands.

“I don’t know,” Dean says. “Come on. We gotta move!”

Mordechai appears in our path to the stairs and smashes his axe down. He misses us by inches and catches the shelves instead, bringing the jars and broken wood crashing down on Dean. Sam engages in combat with Mordechai, fighting the axe with his gun. He leans back and yells, “Go! Get out of here!”

I go to Dean and dig him out of the mess. He gets to his feet and we bolt for the door. At the top of the stairs we turn around and see Mordechai swing and miss Sam, his axe colliding with an electrical box, sending sparks flying everywhere. While he’s busy trying to wedge his axe out of the box, Sam runs for us and we get the hell out of there.

We’re closer to the back exit than the front. The three of us burst through the door at the same time and get stuck in the frame. We finally push through, falling over the emergency tape at the edge of the porch, and roll down the steps into a heap at Ed and Harry’s feet.

“Whoa,” Harry says, his camera raised.

I get up and rub my head. I think Sam kicked me on our way down. Ed flashes a giant flashlight in Dean’s face. On top of the dye from the shower, Dean is now covered in the muck from the jars.

Ed leans down and squints at Dean. “Are you blue?”

“Get that damn thing outta my face,” he growls, shoving the light and Ed to the side as he stands up.

“Go, go, go!” Sam shouts, because Mordechai appears at the back door.

Ed stares up in horror. “Sweet Lord–”

“–of the Rings,” Harry finishes, his tiny bug eyes wide in the night. “RUN!”

Sam, Dean and I take off around the side of the cabin, leaving Ed and Harry to flee straight back – right into the arms of the policemen from earlier. We saw the cops, we would just rather them get caught than us.

Back at the motel, Dean spends forty-five minutes in the shower. I don’t blame him. So far he’s had terrible luck – falling into the river in Jericho that we later found out was part of a sewage transport, which is why Dean smelled like a toilet, getting turned blue, and now getting covered in seventy year old preserves.

When Dean finishes up, I shower. After I dress, I reach for the deodorant I know I left on the counter in the bathroom, but it’s not there. Hmm. Maybe I put it back in my bag this morning and forgot. I go out to the room, towel-drying my hair.

“Have you guys seen my deodorant?”

Dean looks up from whatever he’s scribbling in his Dad’s journal on the bed. “No.”

I look over at Sam, where he sits at the table on his laptop. With his eyes fixed to the screen, he says, “Uh, didn’t you put it in your duffel earlier?”

My duffel bag is on the dresser, where I left it. I’m well overdue for a prank, so I’m wary as I sift through the bag for the deodorant. It looks unscathed. “Hmph.” I narrow my eyes at Sam, point two fingers at my eyes, then over at him, while I go back to the bathroom.

I immediately regret not checking the stick itself as I put it under my shirt and something soft and creamy deposits onto my armpit instead of antiperspirant. I rip off my shirt and lift up my arm. White stuff is smeared all over it. I sniff the deodorant. The stick was replaced with garlic cream cheese. I wipe off my armpit with my shirt and walk back out in the sports bra I wear for bed. I’m too pissed off to cover up, and it’s not like Sam cares.

“Real funny, Sam,” I say, and chuck the uncapped deodorant at him. He catches it and some gets on his hand. He laughs and casually wipes the cream cheese off on a napkin. I pull out the drawer and open Dean’s duffel.

“Hey, that’s my bag!” Dean exclaims. “That cream cheese thing wasn’t my idea!”

“Calm down,” I snap. I apply his deodorant and return it to his bag, then pull on a fresh shirt and sit on the bed next to Dean. He shows me what he’s been doodling. It’s the question mark symbol from the Hell House.

“What the hell is this?” he says, frustrated. “It’s bugging the hell out of me. This whole damn job’s bugging me. I thought the legend said Mordechai only goes after chicks.”

“It does,” Sam says to his laptop.

“All right. Well, I mean, that explains why it went after you and Harley, but why me?” Dean closes the journal but keeps the sketch of the symbol out.

Sam rolls his eyes. “Hilarious.”

“The legend also says he hung himself, but did you see those slit wrists?” I say.

“What’s up with that?” Sam says. He returns to his laptop, typing away. “And the axe, too. I mean, ghosts are usually pretty strict, right? Following the same patterns over and over?”

Dean nods. “But _his_ mood keeps changing.”

“Exactly.” Sam continues to type, then stops to scroll through something. “I’m telling you, the way the story goes – wait a minute.” He leans in closer to the screen and his eyes flick back and forth as he reads at top speed.

“What?” Dean and I say together.

“Someone added a new post to the Hell Hound site. Listen to this. ‘ _They say Mordechai Murdock was a Satanist who chopped up his victims with an axe before slitting his own wrists. Now he’s imprisoned in the house for eternity’_.” He looks up at us.

“Where the hell is this going?” I say.

Dean suddenly sits up straight in the bed, clutching his drawing. “I don’t know, but I think I might have just figured out where it all started.” He grabs his leather jacket and keys. “We need to go back to the music store.”

“Come on, Dean, you’re not going to find the answer in a record,” Sam says.

“Oh yeah?” Dean shoves the drawing of the symbol in Sam’s face, then in mine. And after Sam’s comment, after hearing Dean complain about the symbol for the hundredth time, I finally remember why it looks so familiar.

“No way.” I snatch the paper from him. “I stared at this damn symbol the entire time we drove to Texas.” And I did, because Dean made me organize his Blue Öyster Cult cassette tapes in order from oldest to newest, so we could listen to them chronologically. The symbol is on the flag in their first album, in the center of “Tyranny and Mutation”, on the breast of one of the members in “Fire of Unknown Origin”.

“What?” Sam says, annoyed that he’s out of the loop.

“BOC, my man.” Dean pats him on the back and heads for the door.

“Dean, it’s one in the morning,” I say. “I know we don’t have a biological clock but other people do.”

“Then we’ll go tomorrow,” Dean says, then scrunches up his face. “Or today. Whatever.” He flops back down on the bed.

At the music store in the morning, we find Craig behind the counter, his head in his hands, sporting another almost-hip retro outfit. At least this time, there’s a customer flipping through a rack of posters.

“Hey, Craig. Remember us?” Dean says.

Craig lifts his head. He looks absolutely miserable. “Guys, look, I’m really not in the mood to answer any of your questions, okay?” He hops off a stool and walks around the counter.

“Oh, don’t worry. We’re just here to buy an album.” Dean makes a show of flicking through a few records. He manages to find “Fire of Unknown Origin”. As we approach the counter, he says casually but obnoxiously loud to me and Sam, “You know, I couldn’t figure out what that symbol was, and then I realized it doesn’t mean anything. It’s the logo for the Blue Öyster Cult.” He flips over the album, shows it to Craig. He says his next words softly, with a slight smile.

“Tell me, Craig, you, uh, you into BOC? Or just scaring the hell out of people?” Seems more terrifying than any threat, coming from Dean. “Now, why don’t you tell us about that house…without lying through your ass this time.”

Craig presses his lips together, then sighs. “All right. My cousin Dana was on break from TCU. Ah, I guess we were just bored, looking for something to do. So I showed her this abandoned dump I found. We thought it would be funny if we made it look like it was haunted. So we painted symbols on the walls, some from albums, some from a few of Dana’s theology textbooks. Then we found out this guy Murdock used to live there so we made up some story to go along with that. Staged Dana’s hanging in the cellar. Then those people told people, who told other people. And then these two guys put it on their stupid website. Everything just took on a life of its own. I mean, I thought it was funny at first but…now that girl’s dead! It was just a joke, you know? I mean, none of it was real, we made the whole thing up. I swear!”

Craig’s frantic desperation, the clear fear in his eyes as he relives the mistakes he made, makes Dean relax. It just confuses me. I mean, I believe him. Craig seems to be telling the truth. But that just causes more problems for us.

“All right,” Sam says softly, ending the conversation. Craig nods and disappears behind a curtain of beads printed with Bob Marley’s picture on them.

When we’re at the door of the music shop, Dean turns to Sam and I and voices my concern: “If none of it was real, how the hell do you explain Mordechai?”

We’re at a loss.

Sam holds the door of the Impala open for me but I don’t get in.

“Do you guys need anything?” I ask. “I’m gonna stop by a store and get some new deodorant.” I shoot Sam a glare and he laughs.

Dean’s head pops back up over the other side of the car. “Uh, I can get it if you want. Pick up some food, too.” He tosses me the keys. “I’ll meet you guys back at the motel.”

“Don’t you want the car then? You’ll be stuck carrying everything.” I throw back the keys.

“Right,” Dean chuckles. He drives off and Sam and I walk the couple of blocks to the motel, speculating about what Mordechai could be.

Dean shows up while Sam’s in the shower and I’m at the table browsing through the Hell Hound website. Without so much as a hello, he tosses a brown bag seeping with grease and a plastic bag on the table and hunts around the room. I watch him, out of curiosity, and I can’t believe the item he searches for is a pair of Sam’s boxers he laid out before his shower. He rips into a small, purple packet and shakes a near-translucent powder into them.

“Hey, I’m back!” he calls out.

“Hey!” Sam shouts from the shower.

“Um, hi?” I wave my hand a little to get Dean’s attention. “What are you doing there?”

“Don’t ask and don’t tell, unless you want some too.”

“So I think I might have a theory about what’s going on,” Sam says from behind the closed bathroom door, his voice still raised.

“You think about some awesome stuff while you’re in the shower,” I yell. When we got to the motel we were both at about square negative one in the idea category.

“Yeah, shut up,” Sam shouts. “What if Mordechai is a Tulpa?”

“Tulpa?” Dean repeats distractedly, tapping the purple packet with a little more force to get the last of the powder out.

I grab my dad’s journal. “A Tibetan thought form,” I mutter, flipping through the pages.

“Yeah, A Tibetan thought form,” Sam says, not having heard me, as he opens the bathroom door wearing a towel and holding a toothbrush. Dean tosses Sam’s underwear back on the bed in the nick of time and spins around.

I do a double-take at Sam. He’s definitely not the kid I remember. Holy hell. I thought Dean was fit. Looks like the years in California did Sam well. He stands there, all muscle, his golden skin glistening with steam from his shower, basically radiating strength. I shake my head, as if that will clear the thoughts away, and go back to my dad’s journal.

“Ah, yeah, I know what a Tulpa is,” Dean says. “Hey, why don’t you get dressed, I wanna go get something to eat.” Sam leans to the side and stares pointedly at the bag of food on the table next to me. Dean grins. “Or coffee or something.”

“Whatever, man,” Sam says, taking his pile of clothes from the bed and returning to the bathroom.

We eat in the room and go out for coffee after. I’m glad for it, too. If we’re going to start researching Tulpas, I would rather be outside than cooped up in our motel room. There’s a nice coffee house that we passed a couple of times already down the street from the music shop.

On the way in, Sam adjusts his pants. The first sign of the itching powder. Dean fights a smile while he orders coffees for us.

“Here you go,” a male server says. He sets down three cups on the counter.

“Thank you,” Dean says. He picks up two and nods to me to get the third. He keeps his eye on Sam, who now grimaces as he pulls at his pants. I can tell he wants to do more but he’s in public. “Dude, what’s your problem?”

Sam looks up and sees Dean watching him. His grimace fades. “Nothing, I’m fine.”

“Yeah?” Dean raises an eyebrow and takes a seat at an empty table. “All right, well, let’s keep going. What about these Tulpas?”

Sam fixes his coffee with sugar and cream as he talks. “Okay, so there was this incident in Tibet in 1915. A group of monks visualized a golem in their head.”

“I remember that story,” I say while Sam takes a sip of his coffee. “My dad mentioned it once. They meditated on it so hard they brought the golem to life, right?”

Sam nods. “Out of thin air.”

“So?” Dean says.

“Really, Dean?” I say. “I know we see some crazy stuff, but that’s pretty incredible. And it was only twenty monks. Imagine what ten thousand web servers could do.”

“Yeah,” Sam agrees. “I mean, Craig starts the story about Mordechai, then it spreads, goes online. Now there are countless people all believing in the bastard.”

“Now wait a second. Are you trying to tell me that just because people believe in Mordechai, he’s real?” Dean looks back and forth between Sam and I in abhorrence.

“I don’t know. Maybe,” Sam says uncomfortably.

Dean scoffs. “People believe in Santa Clause. How come I’m not getting hooked up every Christmas?”

“’Cause you’re a bad person.” Sam opens his laptop and turns it around. “And because of this,” he adds.

He shows us a downloaded photo of one of the symbols from the Hell House. The squiggly one that I didn’t recognize.

“That’s a Tibetan spirit sigil. On the wall of the house. Craig said they were painting symbols from a theology textbook. I bet they painted this, not even knowing what it was. Now, that sigil has been used for centuries, concentrating meditative thoughts like a magnifying glass. So people are on the Hell Hound’s website, staring at the symbol, thinking about Mordechai.” Sam brings the laptop back around to face him and stares at the symbol himself. “I mean, I don’t know. It might be enough to bring a Tulpa to life.”

“It would explain why he keeps changing,” I say.

Sam frowns, distracted by the itching in his pants, and shifts his hips in his chair. After a moment he says, “As the legend changes, people think different things. So Mordechai himself changes. That would also explain why the rock salt didn’t work.”

“Yeah, because he’s not a traditional spirit,” Dean agrees.

“Yeah.” Sam still fidgets in his chair. It must be getting worse.

“Okay. So why don’t we just, uh, get this spirit sigil thingy off the wall and off the website?” Dean suggests.

“Well, it’s not that simple,” Sam says. “You see, once Tulpa’s are created they take on a life of their own.”

“Great,” Dean says. “So if he really is a thought form, how the hell are we supposed to kill an idea?”

While itching, Sam shows us the Hell Hound’s website. “It’s not going to be easy with these guys helping us. Check out their homepage.” He clicks the play icon on a video. It’s footage from the other night. “Since they’ve posted the video their number of hits have quadrupled in the last day alone.”

I stare at the laptop. “Guys,” I say excitedly, “if this website is how the Mordechai legend spread in the first place, why can’t we use that to our advantage?”

Dean’s face lights up. “I got an idea. Come on.” He hops off his stool.

“Where we going?” Sam asks.

“We gotta find a copy store,” Dean says.

Sam stands and packs up his laptop. He pulls at his pants, still itching and wiggling around. “Man, I think I’m allergic to our soap or something.” Dean bursts out laughing and heads for the door. “You did this?” Sam yells. Dean continues to laugh. “You’re a friggin’ jerk!”

“Oh yeah,” Dean calls over his shoulder.

After giving Sam a chance to clean up and change and craft a fake death certificate at Dean’s request, we drive to a trailer park where the wannabe Hardy Boys live. Their trailer is small and definitely not sound-proof. We can hear Ed and Harry bickering through the tin sidewalls. Dean holds out his arm to stop Sam from knocking. We eavesdrop on their conversation for a moment.

“No, no, no, forget it! Forget it! I’m not going back in there again.”

“Harry, look at me. Right here. Okay? You’re a ghost hunter, okay?”

“I know but, Ed, I’ve never seen a real ghost before! Like, a real ghost, an apparition!”

“This stuff here, this is our ticket to the big time. Fame, money, sex…with girls.”

Dean and I silently laugh.

“Be brave. W-W-B-D. What Would Buffy Do. Huh?”

“What Would Buffy Do. But Ed, she’s stronger than me.”

“It’s okay.”

I lean on Dean, clutching my side. It hurts trying to laugh quietly when I just want to bust out. Even Sam’s got a grin on his face. Dean reaches forward with a fist and bangs three times on the door. From inside, someone squeals. I bet it’s Harry, because his weakened voice calls out, “Who is it?”

“Come on out here, guys, we hear you in there,” Dean says.

“It’s them!” Ed cries. There’s some shuffling around and then Ed and Harry stick their heads out of the door.

Dean grins. “Ah, would you look at that! Action figures in their original packaging. What a shock.”

“Guys, we need to talk,” I say.

“Yeah, um, sorry. We’re a little busy right now,” Ed says.

“Okay, well, we’ll make it quick.” Dean steps forward threateningly, and Ed and Harry retreat a pace before getting their bearings and stepping out of the trailer with a false air of bravado. They’re so skittish. Like freaking Chihuahuas.

“We need you to shut down your website,” I say.

Ed laughs in disbelief and looks at Harry. “Man, you know, these guys got us busted last night, spent the night in a holding cell…”

Harry rounds on us. “I had to pee in that cell urinal. In front of people. And I get stage fright!”

“Why should we trust you guys?” Ed asks.

“Look, we all know what we saw last night, what’s in the house,” Sam says, “but now thanks to your website there are thousands of people hearing about Mordechai.”

“Which means people are going to keep showing up at the Hell House. Running into him in person,” I say. “Somebody could get hurt.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ed grumbles.

Harry, however, might have a more sensible head on his shoulders. “Ed, maybe she’s got a point. Maybe…”

“Nope,” Ed says sternly.

“Nope,” Harry echoes, more confidently.

“We have an obligation to our fans, to the truth,” Ed says.

Dean lunges forward. “Well, I have an obligation to kick both your little asses right now–”

I step in front of him, my arms spread wide. “Dean – hey, just forget it, all right?”

Sam says in a hushed voice, “You could probably bitch slap them both. I could probably even tell them that thing about Mordechai. But they’re still not gonna help us. Let’s just leave.”

Ed and Harry suddenly perk up, playing right into our ruse.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Dean says. We leave the trailer and cross the street to the Impala, walking dramatically slow, with Ed and Harry trailing behind.

“What you say?” Ed calls.

“Hang on a second here,” Harry says. “What thing about Mordechai, you guys?”

“Don’t tell them, Sam,” I say loudly.

Sam shrugs his shoulders, exaggerating the motion. “But if they agree to shut the website down, Harley…”

“They’re not going to do it, you said so yourself,” Dean says. We stop before the Impala. Ed abruptly stops too, and Harry runs into his back.

“Dude,” Ed scolds him. Then to us, he says, “No, wait. Wait. We’ll do it. We’ll do it.”

I give an embellished sigh. “It’s a secret.”

Sam puts on a defeated look and turns to the boys. “It’s a really big deal, all right? And it wasn’t easy to dig up. So only if we have your word that you’ll shut everything down…”

“Totally,” Ed says, with a mischievous gleam in his eye that clearly says he will do no such thing. Which is what we’re counting on.

“All right,” Sam says easily.

Dean produces the paper from the copy shop and hands it to Ed. “It’s a death certificate. From the thirties,” he says with an obvious grin.

“We got it at the library,” I say. “Now, according to the coroner, the actual cause of death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

“That’s right. He didn’t hang or cut himself,” Dean says.

“He shot himself?” Ed says, looking almost disappointed.

“Yep. With a .45 pistol.” Sam leans in dramatically. Ed and Harry do the same. They’re eating this stuff up. “To this day, they say he’s terrified of them.”

“Matter of fact, they say if you shoot him with a .45, loaded with these special wrought-iron rounds, it’ll kill the son of a bitch,” Dean says.

Ed and Harry snigger gleefully. Dean gives them a final smile, and then Harry spins on his heel and bolts back towards the trailer. Ed takes off too, though not as fast.

“Harry!” Ed hisses. “Slow your roll, buddy. They’re gonna know we’re excited.”

“That was too easy,” Dean says.

“And now we wait,” I add.

We head back to town, to yet another diner. When it comes to waiting around there’s not much else to do but eat. Sam does pretty well for himself with the whole eating out thing. Whenever he can he sticks to the healthier options. Once in a while I’ll have a salad, but more often than not my hunger takes over and leafs and vegetables just won’t cut it. Dean would never dream of touching salad. He calls it rabbit food. But I can’t remember the last time I had a home cooked meal and sooner or later I’m pretty sure all this fast food is going to kill us.

So here we are, sitting in a booth in Tony’s Diner, playing the waiting game. Sam sits across from Dean and I, staring at his laptop. He’s been refreshing the Hell Hound website periodically since we got our food.

Dean looks up at this horrendous woodwork of a fisherman holding a giant fish hanging on the wall beside our table. He pulls the chain dangling underneath the frame and the fisherman’s wooden mouth moves up and down out of synch with an atrocious laugh. Sam pulls the cord to stop it and glares at Dean.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” I say.

“Want another beer?” Dean asks me.

“Sure.”

“I got it,” Sam says. We both leave the table. He heads to the counter and I go to the back of the diner.

I return to find Dean and Sam alternately pulling the chain on the fisherman. The annoying cackle starts and cuts off multiple times. It’s like Dean is a toddler who hasn’t been trained how to behave in public, but I know he’s just doing it to get on Sam’s nerves. Which is real easy to do since he’s wound so tight. I sit down as Sam stops the laughing yet again.

“If you pull that chain one more time I’m gonna kill you,” he snaps in a murderous tone.

Dean, expressionless, locks eyes with Sam as he slowly reaches up and pulls the chain again. Sam rolls his eyes and cuts the laughing. Dean starts snickering.

“Come on, man, you need more laughter in your life. You know, you’re way too tense.”

Sam throws him a dirty look. I told Dean it was too soon for the pranks but I guess he forgot.

Dean sighs. “They post it yet?”

Sam silently spins his laptop around to us and stabs his salad angrily. Dean and I lean together and I read from the screen: _“‘We’ve learned from reputable sources that Mordechai Murdock has a fatal fear of firearms’.”_

“All right. How much longer should we wait?”

“Long enough for the new story to spread and the legend to change. I figure by nightfall, iron rounds should work on the sucker.” Sam holds his beer up to Dean. Dean grasps his own and taps it against Sam’s. He takes a long swig. Sam holds his beer out to me as well. I go to grab mine, but I notice some clear gel almost indiscernible from the condensation on the side of the glass. I touch it and the tips of my fingers attach to the bottle.

“What the hell?” I look up at Sam. He quickly puts his beer to his lips to hide his smile. I pull the bottle off my fingers before the sticky gel dries.

“What’s up?” Dean asks. He sets his bottle down on the table. When he takes his hand away, his beer goes with it. He stares at it, confused, then looks up at Sam in horror. “You didn’t.”

Sam bursts out laughing, the most I’ve seen him laugh since we met up again, and holds up a small tube of super glue. “Oh, I did!” I allow myself to laugh only because I so nearly avoided having my hand super glued to a beer bottle. Dean drains the rest of the beer and then shakes his hand wildly, trying to dislodge the bottle. This time, Sam pulls the chain to set the fisherman cackling again.

Getting the glue off Dean’s hand is no easy task. We sit huddled together at the table in the motel while I go at the bottle with a knife, at least trying to separate the glue and the bottle. We picked up some acetone on the way back. It helped loosen the glue, at least.

“I don’t see why you had to manhandle the bottle, Dean,” I say. “Holding it from the neck works, too.”

He makes a face at me. “I’ll hold _you_ by the neck,” he grumbles.

Sam sits stretched out on the bed with a smug smile. It’s evident that this prank tops all, but I think I have one more hidden up my sleeve that I just might be able to pull off.

Finally, with a hard yank, Dean pulls the beer bottle off his hand. He grits his teeth together. Little red welts form on his palm from where the glue pulled layers of skin along with it. I have to use acetone to break up the remaining glue on his hand, and it has to burn those welts even though he doesn’t so much as whimper.

“All right, you’re all done,” I say. “Wash your hand with soap and use the lotion I left on the counter to moisturize it.”

The water in the bathroom turns on. After a few moments, it shuts off. Dean calls out, “What lotion?” Right on cue.

“Oops, hold on.” I run to the dresser. Sam’s bag is next to mine. I see the dye he used in the showerhead in the netting of the side pocket. I snag that as well as the lotion and go inside the bathroom.

“What are you doing?” Dean asks.

“Shut up,” I whisper, and shove the lotion in his hands and grab Sam’s toothbrush. Thankfully the bristles are blue to match the dye. Slowly, I pour the dye on. It gets all over the sink and the sides of the toothbrush. I wipe it off before it stains and set the toothbrush back where I found it. Dean stares at me the entire time.

“Want revenge or not, Sticky Fingers?” I point out quietly.

Dean shrugs and we leave the bathroom. I plop down on the bed.

“So there’s bound to be cops still watching the Hell House,” I say. “How are we going to distract them?”

Dean mimics that awful cackling sound from the fisherman frame close to my ear, making me jump. I slap him upside the head.

Sam sits up straight. “That’s actually a good idea.”

“What is?” I ask.

“You think Mr. Tony will let us buy that stupid fisherman?” Sam suggests, his eyebrows raised.

“Bet you’re glad we hustled pool the other day, huh?” Dean says with a smirk.

At the Hell House, we split up. Sam and Dean are on opposite sides of the cabin, hidden in the brush, keeping watch. I take the ugly fisherman frame and find a tree about a hundred yards down the main trail. I set the frame in the crook of a branch and pull the chain. The laugh sounds more creepy out here in the dark, and it echoes too. The end of the chain has a small circle that fits around a jut in the branches, keeping it pulled down and the laughter coming. I sprint away into the trees, knowing that the cops watching the house will be here any second if the laughter is as loud as I think it is in the quiet night.

I manage to find Sam crouching in the bushes. The two cops pass right by us, one telling the other that he swears he heard something. I wiggle my eyebrows at Sam. As soon as the cops are out of view, Sam and I pull out our guns – .45’s loaded with wrought-iron rounds – and flashlights. Dean comes running from across the yard, his gun raised.

Sam kicks down the front door and we enter, flashlights on and held out in one hand, supporting the gun in the other. We begin a methodical search. Once we find Mordechai, it should only take a few rounds to get the job done.

Dean’s light shifts around the room as he readjusts his gun. His hand must be hurting him. He snaps snarkily at Sam, “I barely have any skin left on my palm!”

I snort and Sam scoffs. “I’m not touching that line with a ten foot pole,” he says, and receives Dean’s flashlight in his face. Sam winces in the brightness and moves to another room. Dean and I follow.

“So you think old Mordechai’s home?” I say.

“I don’t know,” Sam says.

“Me either,” someone says from behind us, and it’s not Dean.

The three of us spin around, guns raised, and our flashlights illuminate Ed and Harry in the arch of a door, wearing night vision goggles and carrying a video camera. Harry screams when he sees the guns and Ed shouts, “Whoa! Whoa!”

We lower our guns and Dean hisses angrily, “What are you trying to do, get yourself killed?”

“We’re just trying to get a book and movie deal, okay?” Ed says.

“It’s going to be hard to get that deal if you’re dead,” I growl, and then I stop and listen. Sam and Dean do the same. From somewhere within the house, presumably the basement, is the sound of stone dragged repeatedly across metal. And the sound is slowly getting closer. We all turn to the closed basement door.

“Oh, crap,” Ed mutters. I feel Ed and Harry crowd in close behind us, their camera still raised. “Ah, guys? You wanna open that door for us?”

“Why don’t you?” Dean snaps, but before any of us can step forward the door bursts open and out comes Mordechai, swinging his axe and yelling madly.

The three of us stupidly empty the majority of our clips into Mordechai, who holds on for a moment, wavering slightly, before he disappears into mist. After a painstakingly long moment of waiting for him to return, he doesn’t. Sam and Dean check the other rooms for good measure. I stay with Dumb and Dumber.

“Oh, God. He’s gone. He’s gone,” Ed mumbles to himself.

“Did you get him?” Harry asks.

“Yeah, they got him,” Ed says, relieved.

“No, on camera, did you get him on camera?” Harry says, making a grab for the cam-corder as Ed fumbles to replay the footage. “Let me see it, let me see it.”

Just then, Mordechai appears in the shadows. In one fluid motion I turn to face him and raise my gun, shooting him twice, but he still steps forward with his axe raised and slams it through the camera. Harry falls to the ground with the camera shards. Mordechai disappears again, thankfully, because I’m all out of bullets and ideas at the moment.

“Hey!” Dean shouts, bursting into the room. “Didn’t you post that B.S. story we gave you?”

“Of course we did,” Ed says.

“But then our server crashed,” Harry says as he gets to his feet.

“So it didn’t take?” I yell.

Ed and Harry make inaudible sounds. Dean shoves his .45 in their faces.

“So these guns don’t work?”

“Yes,” Ed says awkwardly.

“Great. Any ideas?” Dean asks me and Sam, who appears in the other doorway, his useless gun still raised.

“We’re getting out of here,” Harry says.

“Yeah,” Ed agrees, and they take off for the front door. Not long after, their screams drift back to us. Mordechai must have reappeared. Ed yells, “The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you!”

“I got it,” Sam says. “Figure something out. _Now_.” He runs in the direction Ed and Harry did, shouting, “Hey! Come and get it, you ugly son of a bitch!” It’s not the time, but I smile because he’s so much like Dean.

Dean and I run to the kitchen and start opening all the cabinets and drawers. We find a small canister of kerosene and spray paint that must have been left over from Craig and Dana.

“You have a lighter?” I ask Dean.

“Yeah, why?” He takes a lighter out of his pocket. I hand him the spray paint.

“Go save Sam.” I grab the kerosene. Dean stares at it for a moment, then he nods, understanding. I shake the kerosene around the kitchen, then go into each of the other rooms, leaving small splashes of trails so they all connect. I toss the empty canister in the corner and go find the boys.

The plume of fire from the spray paint fumes dissipates just as I turn the corner. Dean’s makeshift blowtorch must have staved off Mordechai, because he’s not in the vicinity.

Sam yanks Ed and Harry’s collars and shoves them out of the House. Dean grabs my arm and tosses me out as well, then he clicks the lighter until the flame appears.

“Mordechai can’t leave the house. We can’t kill him. So, we improvise.” He chucks the lighter back through the front door and it lands in the middle of a kerosene puddle. The lighter explodes and the flames spread through the house. With all the old wood, it’s like super-kindling, and the entire cabin is ablaze in less than two minutes.

We run to the bushes and hide, mainly to catch our breath, and also because the cops will surely be around.

Sam rubs his throat and says angrily, “That’s your solution? Burn the whole damn place to the ground?”

“Well, nobody will go in anymore,” Dean says with a guilty look on his face.

I touch Sam’s arm. Pull it away when I feel the muscles under his shirt. “Look, Mordechai can’t haunt a house if there’s no house to haunt. It’s fast and dirty, but it works.”

“What if the legend changes and Mordechai is allowed to leave the house?” Sam says irately.

“Well…well then we’ll just have to come back,” Dean says, as if that’s the most rational solution ever. Sam stares at him with incredulity.

We watch the house burn. Sam calms down after a bit. “Kind of makes you wonder, of all the things we hunted, how many existed just because people believed in them?”

He’s got a good point. At least the majority of what we’ve set out to hunt has been killed, though. Then I think about what it is to believe in those things, and I remember Sam that day in the snow, all those years ago. I look up at him now and wonder, could Dean have ever really protected him from the monsters? Could I really have continued in the hunt with my pure intention in mind forever? If all it takes is a sigil and a lot of brain power to create a monster, there was never any way I was going to succeed. Not that I ever thought I would, once I figured out the magnitude of what I was asking of myself.

We make our way back to the Impala. Somehow I don’t feel the same satisfaction after our usual hunts. There was nothing gratifying about how this case ended. Maybe Sam was on to something; maybe we’ll end up back in Richardson someday, fight the Tulpa again. As of now, the score is in our favor, though.

Sam finally uses his dyed toothbrush. Dean and I sit on the bed together, watching some boring late-night television, when Sam comes out, hands on his hips, a sort of defeated smirk on his face.

“All right,” he says. He bares his teeth, showing pearly blues. “All right.”

And so ends our pranks.

I barely get any sleep because Dean tosses and turns the entire night, rocking the mattress and hogging the covers. My semi-conscious dreams are filled with flashing scenes of me hunting down Mordechai Murdock in the woods and then slicing him up and cooking him on a George Foreman electric grill, all the while Ed and Harry recite Shakespeare dressed as hobbits in the background.

The next day we decide to hang out at the trailer park and check on Ed and Harry. After Sam rescued them from Mordechai, they bolted out the front door and disappeared. We didn’t bother looking for them.

Ed and Harry turn a corner around a small building, carrying overstuffed brown paper grocery bags.

“I was thinking that Mordechai would have a really super high attack bonus,” Harry says thoughtfully.

Ed sticks his nose in his grocery bag. “Man, I got the munchies right now.”

He lifts his head and sees us sitting at a picnic table. We stand and walk up to them. “Gentlemen. Lady,” Ed greets us cordially.

“Hey guys,” Sam says.

Harry’s eyes flit to Ed. “Should we tell them?”

“Might as well. You know they’re going to read about it in the trades.” Ed smiles broadly at us. I raise an eyebrow.

“So this morning we got a phone call from a very important Hollywood producer,” Harry says as he and Ed lead us over their trailer, which has been hitched to a tiny blue car. The car is piled with all of their lawn ornaments and chairs, random objects and such – including a couple of pink flamingos.

“Oh yeah?” Dean says. “Wrong number?”

“No, smartass,” Ed snaps. “He read all about the Hell House on our website and wants to option the motion picture rights. Maybe even have us write it.” He stuffs the grocery bag in the extremely limited space in the back seat.

“And create the RPG,” Harry says.

“The what?” Dean asks.

“Role playing game?” Ed clarifies mockingly.

“Right.” Dean rolls his eyes.

“A little lingo for ya,” Ed says, tilting his head to the side with one eyebrow raised. “Anyhoo, excuse us. We’re off to la-la land.”

“Well, congratulations guys. That sounds really great,” Sam says.

“Yeah,” I say. “That’s awesome. Best of luck to you.”

“Oh, yeah, luck. That has nothing to do with it.” Ed looks at Harry, and they share a sardonic glance. “It’s about the talent. Sheer, unabashed talent.” He nods and tips us off with two fingers. “Later.” They get in the car. It backfires twice on their slow roll out of the trailer park.

“Wow,” Dean says as we watch them leave.

“I know,” I agree.

“I have a confession to make,” Sam says while we walk back to the Impala. “I, uh, I was the one that called them and told them I was a producer.”

I laugh. “Yeah, well, I’m the one who put the dead fish under their seat. And after Ed’s comments, I really don’t feel bad about it.”

“Wait, what?” Dean says. “I told you I was going to put the fish under their seat.”

“No, I said _I_ was going to do it. Wait, did you put a fish under there, too?”

Dean cocks his head to the side. “Maybe.”

The three of us laugh. Sam smiles at us both, his blue teeth shining in the setting sun. He scrubbed his teeth at least four times this morning and he’s only just started to get the dye to fade. At least Dean’s no longer blue.

“Truce?” Sam offers.

“Yeah, truce,” Dean says, and I concur as well. “At least for the next hundred miles.”

We get in the car. I take shotgun this time. Dean replaces the Motorhead cassette with Blue Öyster Cult. No surprise there. Dean drives out of the trailer park and onto the highway, singing _Burnin’ For You_. What the hell. I give in and sing along as well.


	9. Skin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes a turn down a dark path and sets the tone for the next few chapters, which I consider my favorites.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was weird to portray Harley as someone who gets so offended/jealous over Dean's actions. Typically she doesn't care, or if she does, she plays it off (I didn't say she plays it off WELL haha). Like, Chapter 4 she acted jealous. She was figuring out her feelings. But what happens this chapter is a little bit deeper than that.  
> Also, I don't write much about the aftermath of Mark Cooper's death, but I elaborate on her feelings over a boy. That, oddly, stems from my numbness to the notion of death. My career has made me see death as nothing more than the expiring of a body (and sometimes I'll get to touch that mangled dead body, which is AWESOME). But I can't control my emotions over living things/people who are alive. It's weird. Anyway...

Our first Christmas together we spend apart. Defeating a spirit in Ankeny, Iowa taking on the form of the Hook Man – from the infamous urban legend – led to extreme tension between Sam and Dean. Sam got close to the preacher’s daughter, whom the spirit was latching on to, and Dean offered to stick around for a while. But Sam refused, leading to a fight about Jessica. Then they argued about their dad, and Sam took off. That was after I yelled my piece about how they were being ridiculous and stupid and fighting wasn’t going to get them any closer to finding their mother’s or Jessica’s killer, and left the motel for a few hours. I came back to find Dean alone and drunk. After he passed out with his head in my lap, I sat up for a while, replaying parts of their fight over and over in my head.

“You know what, that’s it,” Dean had said. He threw down his dad’s journal and glared at Sam. “This is about Jessica, isn’t it? This has got to stop, man. I mean, the nightmares and calling her name out in the middle of the night. It’s gonna kill you. Now listen to me. It wasn’t your fault. If you want to blame something, blame the demon that killed her. Or hell, why don’t you take a swing at me? I mean, I’m the one that dragged you away from her in the first place.”

Sam looked like he was seriously considering taking that offer before he managed to say that he didn’t blame Dean.

“Well, you shouldn’t blame yourself, because there’s nothing you could’ve done!” Dean yelled. As if yelling would make Sam understand better.

“I could have warned her!” Sam yelled back.

“About what? You didn’t know it was gonna happen!”

After this, they argued about John and if they were ever going to find him and Dean got after Sam about leaving the job for college and Sam got after Dean about all the crap John put them through since they were kids. That’s about when I tried to intervene. Not long after that Sam left.

It was clear that Sam didn’t plan on coming back any time soon when he was still gone the next night. I figured it was as good a time as any to take a little break and go visit Bobby Singer. I left Sam a voicemail letting him know where we were headed, heaved Dean into the Impala, and started for South Dakota. During a break in Crofton, Nebraska, we got snowed in our motel for three days. By that time, Sam called with a possible case.

When the roads cleared, we met him in Oasis Plains, Oklahoma, and investigated killer bugs in a new community of homes that was built on an ancient Indian burial site. It was a very interesting, very stressful case, and Sam and Dean were able to patch things up before we got ourselves killed. I almost thought they wouldn’t, to be honest, because Sam looked like he would never forgive Dean after he walked in on us having sex again, only this time we were in a fancy steam shower one of the nights we were squatting in an empty house in the new track of homes. Sam yelled at us for twenty minutes straight about how locks were created and why they’re such a great invention.

Winter passes slowly. Too slowly, because as February rolls around we’re no closer to finding John. Dean and I backtrack over all the places we traveled with John the past two years to see if he’s somehow retracing his steps. Nothing. Sam scours FBI databases for any information that could even remotely resemble John. Still nothing. By now, there’s only one conclusion we can come to regarding him, and none of us wants to voice it.

Dean and I are set up with Sam’s laptop and mine at a small table outside a café in sunny Pocatello, Idaho. I said I would check police reports in cities mentioned in John’s journal if Dean would go back over the FBI database. I strike out in the eighth city and sit back in my chair, coffee in hand. Sam paces in front of the Impala a few yards away, talking on the phone. He hangs up and walks back to our table.

“Your, uh, half-caf double vanilla latte is getting cold over here, Francis,” Dean says snidely.

“Bite me.” Sam takes a seat.

“So, anything?” I ask eagerly. My eagerness is slightly selfish at this point. I want to find John because I’m simply getting tired of searching.

He shakes his head. “I had them check the FBI’s Missing Person’s Data Bank, the one we couldn’t crack last week. No John Doe’s fitting Dad’s description. I even had them run his typical plates for traffic violations.”

“Oh, good thinking,” I say. So simple, so effective. Too bad it didn’t turn up any results.

Dean closes Sam’s laptop. He stares at the Impala for a long time before saying, “I don’t think Dad wants to be found.”

I close my eyes and sigh. There it is. The unspoken conclusion. To hear it come from Dean somehow makes it worse. I never thought Dean would give up. When I open my eyes again, Sam’s got the most disappointed look on his face.

“No,” Sam says, shaking his head so his shaggy brown hair falls over his forehead. He pushes it back. “No. I don’t believe that. We’ve got to do something.”

“Would you give it up, Sammy?” Dean says agitatedly. “The trail for Dad is getting colder every day. What are we supposed to do?”

“I don’t know. Something. _Anything_ ,” Sam snaps back.

Dean stands up, sending the iron chair skidding back. “You know what? I’m sick of this attitude. You don’t think I want to find Dad as much as you do?”

“Yeah, I know you do, it’s just–”

“I’m the one that’s been with him every day for the past four years while you’ve been off to college going to pep rallies!” Dean balls up his fists and turns away, as if just the thought could send him over the edge. “Even Harley spent more time with him.”

“Keep me out of this, Dean,” I say. I don’t want to get mixed up in this mess again. It’s just a flashback to December.

“You’re the one who left,” Dean says, pointing at Sam. He fights to keep his voice steady. “If you had just respected Dad enough back then to stay–”

“Oh jeeze, Dean,” I mutter. I put my head in my hands.

“You think I didn’t respect Dad?” Sam speaks slow, evenly, but the unmistakable rage makes him sound more dangerous than Dean when he’s got his temper. “That’s what this is about?”

I see Dean through my fingers, staring at me. Is he thinking of December, too? “Just forget it, all right? Sorry I brought it up.” He pulls his chair back and sits down.

“I respected him, but no matter what I did, it was never good enough,” Sam says.

“So what are you saying? That Dad was disappointed in you?”

“Was?” Sam scoffs. “ _Is_. Always has been.”

“Why would you think that?” The way Dean asks, it’s as if it really never crossed his mind that Sam thought this way. He seems to soften.

Sam, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. Something between astonishment and disgust flashes across his face. “Because I didn’t want to bow hunt or hustle pool. Because I wanted to go to school and live my life, which, to our whacked-out family, made me the freak.”

“Yeah, you were kind of like the blonde chick in The Munster’s.” Dean gives a sort of half grin, but Sam’s not having it.

“Dean, you know what most dads are when their kids score a full ride? Proud. Most dads don’t toss their kids out of the house.”

“I remember that fight,” Dean says. “In fact, I seem to recall a few choice phrases coming out of your mouth.”

Sam stares down his probably cold latte. “You know, truth is, when we finally do find Dad…I don’t know if he’s even going to want to see me.”

Dean looks over at me for help, his eyes silently pleading. How far is he willing to take this? I know of one thing that could maybe help dissipate this situation, get things back on track. “Sam,” I say gently, “Your dad was never disappointed in you. Never. He was scared.”

“What are you talking about?” Sam sort of smirks at me, and I see behind the small disbelief that there’s a part of him that so badly wants to believe me.

“He was afraid of what could’ve happened to you if he wasn’t around,” Dean says. I’m glad he figured out where I was going with that. “But even when you two weren’t talking…he used to swing by Stanford whenever he could.” Sam’s smirk fades. Dean shrugs slightly. “Keep an eye on you. Make sure you were safe.”

“What?” Sam looks at me, and I nod confirmation. I made the trip to Stanford a few times the two years I spent hunting with John and Dean even though I never actually saw Sam around. John did though. Dean refused to. “Why didn’t you tell me any of that?”

“Well, it’s a two way street, dude,” Dean says. “You could’ve picked up the phone.”

Sam is lost for words. He can only stare at Dean sadly before returning his gaze to his coffee. Me, on the other hand, well, let’s just say I’m glad that another bomb’s been defused. I had more than enough feuds with Dean when we first started hunting together.

“You guys ready to hit the road?” I ask. We gather our things and get in the car. Dean is almost out of gas so we stop at the nearest gas station to fuel up. There’s no real set destination for us right now. It’s kind of just point your finger at the map and drive.

I get out of the car with Dean and watch him unscrew the gas cap, put in the nozzle. Sam stays in his seat to browse through his BlackBerry. I cross my arms over my chest and my eyes fix to the black hose leading from the nozzle to the pump.

“Hey, you okay?” Dean asks.

“Yeah.” No. Our search for John has been our number one priority, but while things aren’t always one hundred percent focused on that, there’s hardly ever any time for just Dean and I anymore. And I’m not going to be that self-absorbed, needy girl that constantly needs her…whatever-we-are…by her side. It was just a lot different when we were by ourselves, or even with John. At least then we got some privacy. Sam has never once voiced an objection to Dean and I being together – except when he walks in on us doing _things_ – but how can I go around being my normal self with Dean when I know Sam’s still hurting inside over losing his girlfriend? I’m not saying we were extremely over-affectionate before. Our emotions and feelings are communicated over a wide range of transferences, from something as simple as a brief look. But even then I can’t help the guilt gnawing at me.

All this flashes through my mind in about three seconds. After I was kidnapped by the Benders, Dean and I were able to open up to each other about so much, and it was getting whole lot easier to be able to do that, too. I wonder, if Sam wasn’t here and Dean and I were searching for John on our own and the tension and stress was still raining down on us, would things still be the same? Or would I be able to talk to him about this?

“We should figure out what to do next,” Dean says. He leans back against the pump, speaks up so Sam can hear. “All right, I figure we’ll hit Big Water, Utah by lunch, then Bisbee by midnight.”

I nod, mainly because I don’t care where we go right now. Sam doesn’t respond at all.

“Sam wears women’s underwear,” Dean jibes at Sam’s silence.

“I’ve been listening, I’m just busy,” Sam says.

“Busy doing what?”

“Reading e-mails.”

I walk over to Sam, look over his shoulder at the BlackBerry. “E-mails from who?”

“From my friends at Stanford.” Sam’s thumb rolls the tiny ball on the handheld and the long script on the screen shoots to the top. He scrolls through it again.

“You’re kidding,” Dean says. He returns the nozzle and replaces the gas cap on the car, then comes up to us. “You still keep in touch with your college buddies?”

“Why not?” Sam says. He’s in the conversation but his attention is still on the phone.

“There’s nothing wrong with that, Dean,” I say.

A somewhat astonished look crosses Dean’s face. “Well, what exactly do you tell them? You know, about where you’ve been, what you’ve been doing?”

“I tell them I’m on a road trip with my big brother. That I needed some time off after Jess.”

“Oh, so you lie to them.”

“No…” Sam says slowly. “I just don’t tell them…everything.”

“Yeah, that’s called lying,” Dean points out.

“What’s the big deal?” I say tiredly, pressing my fingers to my temples. “Sam’s here, isn’t he? And isn’t part of our job as hunters keeping what we do a secret?”

Dean shoots me a look. He’s mad that I poke holes in his defense, weakening his chance to be right. He turns back to Sam. “Hey, I get it, you know? Telling the truth is far worse,” he says snootily.

“So what am I supposed to do, just cut everybody out of my life?” Sam says, his voice rising. Dean gives a slight shrug. “You’re serious?”

“Look, it sucks, but in a job like this, you can’t get close to people. Period,” Dean says. Sam raises his eyebrows and gestures to me. “That’s different. She’s one of us.”

Sam scoffs and shakes his head. He returns his attention to his e-mails. Dean and I get in the car and we head for the highway.

“God…” Sam says moments later.

“What?” I ask.

“This e-mail from this girl, Rebecca Warren, one of those friends of mine…”

“Is she hot?” Dean quips. Sam ignores him but I focus a death glare, making him stop. Does he know that stuff bothers me, even if he’s just joking? I wonder if I even have a right to care.

“I went to school with her and her brother, Zack,” Sam continues. “She says Zack’s been charged with murder. He’s been arrested for killing his girlfriend. Rebecca says he didn’t do it, but it sounds like the cops have a pretty good case.”

“Jeeze, Sam, what kind of people are you hanging out with?” I ask.

“No, I know Zack,” Sam says. “He’s no killer.”

“Well, maybe you know Zack as well as he knows you.”

This time, both Sam and I glare at Dean.

“They’re in St. Louis right now. We’re going,” Sam says with a tone of finality, making Dean chuckle. “Dean, turn around.”

“Look, sorry ’bout your buddy, okay? But this does not sound like our kind of problem.”

“It _is_ our problem. They’re my friends.”

“St. Louis is fourteen hundred miles _behind_ us,” Dean says through gritted teeth. Sam continues to stare stubbornly out of the windshield. Dean looks back at me, irritated, then cranks the steering wheel hard and does an illegal U-turn in the middle of the thankfully deserted highway. That’s how we start the twenty hour drive to Missouri.

Nineteen excruciatingly long hours later, we arrive in St. Louis. It’s too early to visit Sam’s friend so we get a motel room and breakfast and take a nap. I kind of wish we could have toured the city instead. It looked beautiful on the drive in, with all the lights from the towers twinkling through daybreak and some large concrete arch rising up by a bay of water.

Rebecca Warren looks genuinely happy to see Sam when we knock on her door in the afternoon. She answers with a beaming smile that sends a large pit straight to my stomach. Dean got his wish. She’s hot. Flowing blonde hair, bright green eyes, tanned skin that accents her white teeth when she smiles. A body with curves I could only ever dream of having. Next to her I look like a lumberjack.

“Oh, my God! Sam!” she squeals.

“Well, if it isn’t little Becky,” Sam says.

“You know what you can do with that little Becky crap,” Rebecca says, and they both smile and hug.

“I got your e-mail,” Sam tells her.

“I didn’t think you would come all the way over here.”

Extending his hand, Dean steps forward. “Dean. Older brother.” He cocks his head toward Sam and flashes that breathtaking smile of his. A smile I haven’t seen in a while.

“Hi,” Rebecca says, pretending to flush as she shakes his hand.

I feel the pit in my stomach grow and I roll my eyes. I wonder if Sam saw because almost immediately, before Dean could try anything, he adds quickly, “Rebecca, this is Harley. She’s a long-time family friend.”

Rebecca politely greets me. It takes nearly all of my energy to put forth something that represents a smile and form a civil hello.

“We’re here to help. Whatever we can do,” Sam says.

“Come in.” Rebecca steps back and holds the door open for us.

We step inside, look around. It’s a big house, the kind most people probably wish they could grow up in. It’s secluded among trees, pushed back from the curb, and we had to walk up a long stone path to get to the front door. I saw a grand balcony over the wide porch. Inside, there’s a straight view back through the house to a large back yard complete with a formal garden, gazebo, pool. The walls and ceiling are painted white, which brings out the bold colors of the expensive-looking furniture and plush cream carpet set against polished wood floors. I particularly envy the stone fireplace and graceful banister that curves around stairs that soar to the second level.

I hate it all.

“Nice place,” Dean says, increasing my irritation.

“It’s my parents’. I was just crashing here for the long weekend when everything happened.” Rebecca looks around and holds herself. “I’m going to stay until Zack’s free.”

“Where are your folks?” Sam asks.

“They live in Paris for half the year. They’re on their way home for the trial.” Oh, sure. Paris. Huge house in Missouri. Rocking body that Dean is totally eating up right now. Rebecca leads us to a humongous black and white kitchen that belongs in a restaurant. “Do you guys want a beer or something?”

Dean opens his mouth to accept, but I cut him off. “No, thanks. So, tell us what happened?”

“Well, um.” Rebecca’s subtle glance at Sam doesn’t go unnoticed. What, am I not good enough to ask questions? Sam nods slightly, giving her the OK. This just annoys me more. “Okay. Zack came home and he found Emily, his girlfriend, tied to a chair. She was beaten up and bloody, and she wasn’t breathing.” Her eyes well up with tears. “So he called the police and…they showed up and they arrested him. But the thing is, the only way that Zack could’ve killed Emily is if he was in two places at the same time. The police have a video. It’s from the security tape across the street. It shows Zack coming home at ten-thirty. Emily was killed just after that, but I swear, he was here with me having a few beers until at least after midnight.”

Sam takes a deep breath and catches my eye, then Dean’s. “You know, maybe we could see the crime scene. Zack’s house.”

“We could,” Dean agrees.

“Why?” Rebecca asks. “I mean, what could you do?”

“Well, me, not much,” Sam says. “But Dean’s a cop.”

Dean chuckles, working hard to get his cheeks to turn pink. “Detective, actually.”

“Really? Where?” Rebecca looks impressed, and really, why shouldn’t she be?

“Bisbee, Arizona. But I’m off duty now.”

“Wow. It’s so great of you to come down, but…” Rebecca stops and looks at me. “Sam never mentioned you before. You’re a close family friend? It’s nice of you to travel all this way.”

“Yeah,” I say peculiarly. “I was closer to Dean.” Was.

“Harley’s actually my partner,” Dean surprises me by saying. “We’re on the force together.”

“Oh, how well that worked out,” Rebecca says. “Really, you guys, it’s so nice to offer, but…I don’t know.”

“Bec, look, I know Zack didn’t do this,” Sam says earnestly. “We have to find a way to prove that he’s innocent.”

After a moment and a deep breath, Rebecca nods. “Okay. I’m going to go get the keys.” She disappears down the hall and leaves us in the kitchen.

Dean turns to Sam. “Oh, yeah, man, you’re a real straight shooter with your friends.”

“Look, Zack and Becky need our help,” Sam says.

“I just don’t think this is our kind of problem,” I say.

“Two places at once? We’ve looked into less.”

I hate to admit it, but Sam’s right. Assuming Rebecca’s not lying through her teeth as an alibi for Zack. I’m more than willing to do this for Sam but I would much prefer to get Dean as far away from Blondie Bimbo as quickly as possible.

Defeated, I nod and walk back out into the hall with the boys following. We meet Rebecca in the foyer. The four of us drive across town to a smaller area of residential homes.

At the front door of Zack’s small house, Rebecca hesitates. “You’re sure this is okay?”

“Yeah. I _am_ an officer of the law.” Dean cuts the crime scene tape across the door with a pocket knife and takes the keys from Rebecca to open the door. Sam, Dean and I walk inside, welcomed by the rusty scent of blood and the sight of the stuff smeared all over the furniture and walls. Rebecca stays uncomfortably on the porch steps.

Sam turns back to the door. “Bec, you want to wait outside?”

“No. I want to help.” She slowly steps inside and shuts the door, muffling the sound of the neighbor’s barking dog.

The room looks frozen in time. The remains of dinner for one on the kitchen table. A game of cards set out on the coffee table in front of the TV. Magazines next to the lamp. Broken glass and papers and books and silverware on the floor. Everything with a fine layer of blood on it.

“Tell us what else the police said,” Dean says.

Rebecca gets choked up again. “Well, there’s no sign of a break-in. They say Emily let her attacker in. The lawyers are already talking about a plea bargain.” Her eyes travel around the blood-smeared room and she finally cries. “Oh, God.”

“Get a grip,” I mutter. Sam glares at me. “Sorry, was that out loud?”

Sam places a comforting hand on Rebecca’s shoulder. “Look, Bec, if Zack didn’t do this, it means someone else did. Any idea who?”

Rebecca closes her eyes and shakes her head. Then, slowly, her head becomes still and she opens her eyes. “Um, actually, there was something. About a week before. Somebody broke in here and stole some clothes. Zack’s clothes. The police don’t think it’s anything. I mean, we’re not that far from downtown. Sometimes people get robbed.”

Sam nods in understanding and walks away. I stand at the edge of the carpet, staring at the room without really seeing it. He comes up next to me. “Harley, are you okay?”

I so very badly want to say, _No, I’m not_. Your stupid horny brother won’t stop flirting with other women in front of me and the last time I confronted him about it the only thing that fixed it was my getting kidnapped and Dean realizing he couldn’t lose me. But actually, I think I should talk to Sam about it, just to have someone to help get it off my chest.

“No,” I say quietly. He just nods instead of pressuring me. So very different from Dean. We turn down a short hallway framed with pictures and find one of Rebecca and Sam and another guy that can only be Zack. Good looks must run in the Warren family.

Dean finds us in the hallway a few minutes later. “So, according to Rebecca, the neighbor’s dog went psycho right around the time Zack’s girlfriend was killed.”

“Think it’s connected?” Sam asks.

“Animals can have a sharp sense of the paranormal,” I say.

Dean shrugs one shoulder. “Yeah, maybe Fido saw something.”

“So, you think maybe this is our kind of problem?” Sam asks expectantly.

Dean draws in a sharp breath through his nose. “No. Probably not. But we should look at the security tape, you know, just to make sure.” Rebecca turns the corner, drawing our attention. Dean asks her, “So, the security footage. You think maybe your lawyers could get their hands on it? ’Cause we don’t have that kind of jurisdiction.”

“I’ve already got it. I just didn’t want to say anything in front of the _cop_.” She looks at Dean slyly, the corner of her mouth pulled up into a shy smirk. Dean laughs. “I stole it from the lawyer’s desk. I just had to see for myself.”

I can’t believe the look of admiration on Dean’s face, as if Rebecca hacked the NSA database for the footage instead of just stealing from her lawyer. “All right,” he says. “Back to your place, then?”

Back at Rebecca’s house, she puts a VCR tape into the player and turns on her huge television. It’s not that hard to tell what’s going on, seeing as there’s four angles on the screen and two of them show Zack’s front door through the trees, but she still feels the need to point every little thing out.

“Okay, here he comes,” she says, when her brother is already on screen. Zack glances around before walking up the porch steps, and just as his face catches in the camera, some sort of glare from the streetlamp reflects on his face, reacting with the lens and making his eyes glow. Weird.

“Twenty-two-oh-four,” Dean says, reading the military-time stamp in the upper right corner. “That’s just after ten. You said time of death was about ten-thirty?”

“Our lawyers hired some kind of video expert. He says the tape’s authentic, it wasn’t tampered with.” She fast forwards through the rest of the uneventful tape and I have a sudden thought about the glare on Zack’s face.

“Hey, Rebecca? Can we get those beers now?” I ask.

She looks at me funny, but still gets up. “Oh, sure.”

“Maybe some sandwiches, too?” Dean calls, thinking I just want something to drink, not that I’m actually trying to get her out of the room. But sandwiches will delay her, so, for once, Dean’s empty pit of a stomach works in our favor.

“What do you think this is, Hooters?” she says. But from the gleam in her eye when she turns back around, I’ll bet both her and Dean wishes it were. I shake my head to clear these unruly thoughts and grab the remote to rewind the tape.

“What is it?” Sam asks me.

“Check this out.” I press play a few seconds before Zack turns his head, then press pause and fast forward, so the VCR plays in slow-motion. Frame by frame, Zack slowly looks into the camera, and his eyes glow silver. I pause the tape.

“Well, maybe it’s just a camera flare,” Dean says.

“That’s not like any camera flare I’ve ever seen,” I say.

Sam leans in to the screen, squinting at it. “You know, a lot of cultures believe that a photograph can catch a glimpse of the soul.”

“And remember that dog was freaking out?” I say. “Maybe it saw this thing. Maybe this is some kind of dark double of Zack’s. Something that looks like him but isn’t him.”

“Like a Doppelganger,” Sam offers thoughtfully.

“Yeah.” I tap my lip. “It’d sure explain how he was two places at once.”

“Nice to see you’re having a change of heart,” Sam teases me gently. “I told you it could be our type of gig.”

“Ha-ha,” I sniff.

This is the first time Sam and I have a sort of connection, feeding off each other’s ideas to further our progress. I have to say, I don’t think Dean cared for it all that much. Every time he opened his mouth to make a suggestion, Sam or I would come up with something first. Personally, I’m just happy something’s bothering _him_ for a change.

Early the next morning, before dawn, Sam rouses us so we can head to Zack’s house to investigate things we didn’t think to look for the first time around. Dean, not being a morning person, is grumpy and complains most of the time. I can’t say I blame him. I’m pretty tired myself from staying up late, unable to sleep, pretending to be okay with Dean’s arms around me. All I could think about was the more time we spend here, the more women we encounter, the more I realize all Dean and I have between us is sex. There’s no love, no romance. We’re not a couple. We’re not in a relationship. And even though we established – two years ago – we care about each other, there’s really nothing stopping him from moving on. This eats away at me all day.

Dean parks the Impala across the street from Zack’s house, out of the line of sight of the security camera at the store across the way. “All right, so what are we doing here at five-thirty in the morning?” he asks Sam as we get out.

“I realized something. The videotape shows the killer going in, but not coming out.”

“So, he went out the back door?” I suggest. I watch Dean lean against the hood of the Impala, nursing his coffee, and struggle to keep the task at hand in mind instead of thinking about how good Dean looks. His hair slightly tousled, his jeans wrinkly. The Samulet catches a ray of early morning sun for a moment and I have a fleeting wish that things could be different.

“Right. So there should be a trail to follow.” Sam looks over at the house. “A trail the police would never pursue.”

“Because they think the killer never left,” I say, picking up his thought so quickly Dean is completely pushed from my mind. “And they caught your friend Zack _inside_.”

“I still don’t know what we’re doing here at five-thirty in the morning,” Dean says, shaking his head.

We cross the street and circle around to the back of the house. Or rather, the side of the house. Zack’s place is an end unit townhome. There’s only one way to go if you leave through the back: into the alley.

I come across an electrical pole tucked in near the building. I place my hand on the wood, slide my fingers down, and come across a red splotch smeared into the pole. “Blood,” I say over my shoulder. “Somebody came this way.”

“Yeah, but the trail ends. I don’t see anything over here,” Dean calls.

The wailing of sirens draws our attention to the front of the house. We run up just in time to see an ambulance pass. We don’t waste a moment before heading back to the car so we can follow it.

Three blocks over, the ambulance stops in front of a house scattered with police cars and an unusual amount of bystanders, considering the hour. Raising his eyebrows at us, Dean parks around the corner and we walk over to observe the scene. A burly looking policeman handcuffs a tall, Asian man in a wrinkled suit at the front door and roughly guides him down to the police car at the end of the drive. The cop shoves him inside and slams the door.

We approach the end of the group of bystanders and I ask the nearest woman, “What happened?”

She turns to us and says, “He tried to kill his wife. Tied her up and beat her. I used to see him going to work in the morning. He’d wave, say hello. He seemed like such a nice guy.”

Sam pulls Dean and I to the side. “We need to come back here later, once everything’s blown over.”

So, we kill time. Get breakfast, more coffee. By noon the scene is clear. Sam and I search around outside, looking for any similarities between this crime scene and Zack’s. Dean stays by the car and makes a couple of phone calls.

The house is bordered on one side by an alley, like Zack’s. This would make a perfect getaway for the real killer. I examine the ground, looking for any sign of a blood trail or something relative. Sam pokes around in the garbage cans. I point out a faint trail to Sam that leads from the back door to the alley, but it fades before we can get a good lead on the direction.

Dean comes around the corner. “Hey.” We look up. “Remember when I said this wasn’t our kind of problem?”

“Yeah,” Sam says.

“Definitely our kind of problem.”

“What did you find out?” I ask him.

“Well, I just talked to the patrolman who was first on the scene. Heard this guy, Alex’s story. Apparently the dude was driving home from a business trip when his wife was attacked.”

“So he was two places at once,” I say.

“Exactly. Then he sees _himself_ in the house.” Dean grins. “Police think he’s a nutjob.”

“Two dark doubles attacking loved ones in exactly the same way,” I muse.

“Could be the same thing doing it, too.” Dean has a slightly pleased look on his face, mixed with a bit of smugness. Maybe he’s enjoying how I connect dots with him this time instead of Sam.

But Sam’s no fool. He keeps quiet and does his own connecting. “What if it’s a shapeshifter?” he says. I consider. Dean shrugs. “Something that can make itself look like anyone?”

“Every culture in the world has shapeshifter lore,” I say. “Legends of creatures who can transform themselves into animals or other men.”

“Right. Skinwalkers, werewolves,” Dean says.

I take a deep breath and put my hands on my hips, trying to assess the magnitude of the mess we’ve stumbled upon. “Where would we even begin?”

“Let me ask you this,” Sam says, “In all the shapeshifter lore we know, can any of them fly?”

Dean and I exchange a funny look, not quite sure where Sam’s going with this. “Not that I know of,” Dean says.

“Harley picked up a trail here.” Sam gestures from the back door to where he stands. “Someone ran out the back of this building and headed off this way.”

“Just like your friend’s house,” Dean says. He kneels down, scrutinizes the blood.

“And just like Zack’s house, the trail suddenly ends. I mean, whatever it is, it just disappeared.” I frown as I follow where Dean looks. For some reason he stares at a manhole cover in the center of the alley.

“Well, there’s another way to go.” Dean kicks the manhole cover with his boot. “Down.”

Sam and I move closer. Stare at the rusty metal covering the entrance to the sewer. It would make for a good escape. I’m sure if we looked hard enough beyond Zack’s house, we’d find another sewer entrance somewhere.

“Let’s go visit the Ninja Turtles,” I say.

Dean drags the cover away to reveal the opening. It’s not a far drop to the sewer floor. Sam jumps down first, landing in a small puddle of dirty water. I go down next, followed by Dean. The putrid smell assaults my nose as we walk deeper into the tunnel.

“I bet this runs right by Zack’s house, too,” Sam says. “The shapeshifter could be using the sewer system to get around.”

“I think you’re right.” Dean crouches down next to a soggy, lumpy red-and-flesh-colored pile. “Look at this.” I bend down next to him and see that the reason the pile is flesh-colored is because it’s actually flesh. Discarded skin and blood. I gag, disgusted.

“Is this from his victims?” Sam says, wrinkling his nose.

Dean takes out a pocketknife from the back of his jeans, flips it open, and uses the tip to poke through the skin and hold a bit of it up. Blood and slime oozes down with gravity.

“You know, I just had a sick thought,” I say, my breakfast threatening to make a reappearance. Hardly anything affects me like this. “Maybe when the shapeshifter changes shape it sheds its old skin.”

“That is sick.” Dean tosses the skin aside. “Well, one thing I learned from Dad is, no matter what kind of shapeshifter it is, there’s one sure way to kill it.”

“Silver bullet to the heart,” Sam says.

I look up at the boys. “We’re going to need better weapons.”

We trek back to the open manhole cover. Sam gives me a leg-up since it’s too high for me to reach. I mean, Sam can walk easily in the sewer without ducking. I could make the jump down okay, but I can’t jump up that high.

While Dean and I assemble a few guns and load them with silver bullets from our meager supply, Sam gets a phone call. I listen to his one-sided conversation, trying to figure out what could be going on the other end. I know almost immediately that it’s Rebecca.

“This is Sam,” he says. After a pause, “We’re near Zack’s. Just checking some things out…What are you talking about?...Why would you do that?” Dean and I look at each other, already sensing trouble. “Bec–” Sam sighs, listens for a moment. “We’re trying to help…Bec, I’m sorry, but–” He looks at his phone. Closes it, shaking his head. She probably hung up on him. He walks to the back of the car, looking disappointed.

“I hate to say it, but that’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Dean tells him. “You lie to your friends because if they know the real you, they’d be freaked. It’s just…it’d be easier if–”

“If I was like you?” Sam snaps. “Yeah, easy for you to say. You’ve got Harley. You’re both freaks so there’s nothing to worry about.”

“Hey,” I say with a frown.

“You know what I mean,” he says grumpily.

“Me and Harley, that’s different,” Dean says. My heart flutters in the anticipation of hearing something about us from Dean’s own mouth, but he just finishes loading a semi and packs the clip. “Like it or not, we are not like other people.”

Sam opens his mouth to retaliate, but he shrugs it off, like he’s too tired to fight. Or he knows it will be futile to argue with Dean.

“But I’ll tell you one thing,” Dean continues, in a lighter tone. “This whole gig, it ain’t without perks.” He twirls the gun around his finger and holds it out to Sam.

Sam takes it and puts it in the back of his jeans. Dean and I grab our guns, shut the trunk, and we return to the sewer.

We walk for maybe a mile in the sewers under the guidance of our flashlights. The deeper we get, the more stagnant the rancid air becomes, making me pull the front of my shirt over my mouth and nose to mask the smell. It does little to help.

Dean rounds a shallow turn and holds his flashlight higher. “I think we’re close to its lair.”

“Why do you say that?” Sam asks.

“Because there’s another puke-inducing pile next to your face."

Sam turns and comes face-to-face with a mound of blood and skin stuck to a pipe running the length of the sewer wall. He jumps back and a disgusted warble escapes his throat. “Oh, God!”

Dean and I laugh lightly and continue walking with more caution. Up ahead is a pile of clothes in the corner.

“Looks like it’s lived here for a while,” I say.

“Who knows how many murders he’s gotten away with?” Sam says. Suddenly, his face goes white. “Dean, look out!”

I turn just in time to see the Asian man that was arrested earlier this morning take a swing at Dean. His fist strikes Dean’s jaw with enough force to smash him against the pipe along the wall. First his shoulder, then his face, hits the pipe, and he falls to the ground. Sam and I whip out our guns and each manage a few shots at the shapeshifter as he sprints away down the tunnel at top speed, but we don’t waste more than three bullets altogether. There’s no point in opening fire at him when we don’t have a large supply of silver bullets or a clear shot at his heart.

“Get the son of a bitch!” Dean yells when I make a small effort to see if he’s okay, so Sam and I take off after the shapeshifter. I hear Dean get to his feet and follow us, but slower.

The shapeshifter disappears through a manhole cover with surprising agility. We’re only seconds behind, but by the time we clamber out of the sewer and look around the street, there’s no sign of him.

“All right, let’s split up,” Sam says.

We take off in separate directions, searching for the shapeshifter in the crowd of people on the streets while simultaneously circling back to the car. I stow my gun inside my jacket, knowing that people are usually frightened by strangers running around wielding weapons. With my hand now empty I feel vulnerable as my eyes swiftly flick from person to person, sweeping the area for the shapeshifter.

I must have taken the long way back, or gotten lost, because it seems like I’ve been gone for quite a while and it’s already getting dark when I turn a corner and see Sam and Dean talking by the Impala halfway down the street on the opposite side. I see Sam toss the car keys to Dean, then slowly pull out his gun while Dean is occupied with the trunk, admiring the weapons in the concealed arsenal. What the hell is going on?

“Don’t move!” Sam shouts, his gun pointed at Dean. “What have you done with him?”

“Dude, chill,” Dean says casually. “It’s me, all right?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Sam says. “Where’s my brother?”

“You’re about to shoot him. Sam, calm down.”

Sam shakes his head, his gun still held steady. “You caught those keys with your left. Your shoulder was hurt.”

“What do you want me to do, cry about it?”

What is Sam talking about? Part of me wants to rush over there, but another part, a sensible part, tells me to hang back, approach slowly, in case Sam needs backup. Something is wrong, and Sam knows what it is.

“You’re not my brother!” Sam yells.

I never thought the shapeshifter would be Dean.

“Why don’t you pull the trigger, then?” Dean, the shapeshifter, whatever, taunts Sam. “’Cause you’re not sure. Dude, you know me.”

“Don’t,” Sam says, holding his ground as the shapeshifter takes a slow step forward. That’s when I see the crowbar in the shapeshifter’s hand.

“Sam!” I scream.

It’s too late. The crowbar makes contact with Sam’s skull and he’s on the ground before I can draw my gun and cross the street. The shapeshifter stalks toward me, his eyes glowing silver as he advances. My finger tightens on the trigger the same time the crowbar collides with the side of my face, and everything goes black.

An intense ache on the right side of my head pulls me from unconsciousness. I groan from the pain and squint in the light filtering through slabs of wood nailed untidily over a small window. Dust motes flutter in said light, illuminating a large concrete room. No, not a room. The sewer.

The shapeshifter’s lair.

My eyes finally adjust and fall on Sam a little ways away, his neck and hands bound to a post and blood caked to his temple. After an attempt to turn my head I realize I’m confined in a similar fashion. I can only see what’s in front of me, and that’s slimy concrete walls, piles of bloody flesh and clothes, puddles of sewer water, and some broken crates. I wonder what the rest of the place looks like.

Dean – the real Dean, _my_ Dean – is nowhere in sight. Earlier, by the car, Sam figured out that the shapeshifter had taken on Dean’s form. The last time we saw Dean and the shapeshifter together was in the sewers. That means between the time we split up and then arrived at the car, the shapeshifter captured Dean and then became him.

No, that doesn’t seem entirely right. Why would he capture Dean? The shapeshifter let Zack and the Asian man run free after copying their form. Why would the shapeshifter change his MO now and hold Dean hostage somewhere?

_Because Dean hasn’t found us yet_ , I think. If the shapeshifter let Dean go, there would be nothing stopping him from coming after us. Yet here we are.

So that begs the question, where is Dean? And this is what I scream at the shapeshifter as he struts into the room wearing Dean’s body and clothes like he owns it.

“Where is he? Where is Dean?” My voice echoes through the sewer, startling Sam awake. He looks around. Confusion, unease, rage – but never fear – cross his face when he sees the shapeshifter standing in front of me with his head tilted to the side in an extremely patronizing way.

“I wouldn’t worry about him,” the shapeshifter purrs. The sound of Dean’s voice sends chills down my spine. “I’d worry about you.”

Sam struggles against his binds. “Where is he?” he yells, his voice booming throughout the room with way more intensity than mine had.

The shapeshifter turns his attention on Sam. “You don’t really want to know,” he says with a malicious chuckle. “I swear, the more I learn about you and your family…I thought _I_ came from a bad background.”

“What do you mean, _learn?_ ” Sam says, mirroring the perplexity I feel. The shapeshifter pauses and clutches his head, his face twisting into a grimace. Sam’s eyes find mine and I raise my eyebrows, just as confused as he is.

Finally, the shapeshifter relaxes. Focuses on Sam. “He’s sure got issues with you. You got to go to college. He had to stay home. I mean, _I_ had to stay home. With Dad. You don’t think I had dreams of my own? You don’t think I wanted to be something more than what Dad hammered into my head for decades? But Dad needed me, so I stayed. Where the hell were you?”

“Where is my brother?”

The shapeshifter kneels down in front of Sam. Sam doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move a muscle. His eyes stay locked with the shapeshifter’s as he continues to deride him. “I am your brother. See, deep down, I’m just jealous. You got friends. Got a hot girlfriend. Oh, I mean, _had._ ”

Sam spits on the shapeshifter’s face. With a half-chuckle, the shapeshifter casually wipes the saliva off with the sleeve of his shirt. He doesn’t get mad. Why would he? He’s got the advantage, what with us tied to posts.

“You had a life,” the shapeshifter goes on. “Me? I know I’m a freak. And sooner or later, everybody’s gonna leave me.” He rises and starts a slow saunter in my direction.

“What are you talking about?” Sam asks.

“You left,” the shapeshifter says casually over his shoulder. “Hell, I did everything Dad asked me to, and he ditched me, too. No explanation, nothing. Just poof. Left me with your sorry ass. But still, this life? It’s not without its perks.”

He trains his venomous silver eyes on me. I keep my face cold as stone, but inside that stone begins to chip away. Just from a look. Because even though I know that’s not Dean, there’s no way I’ll ever be able to unsee it twisted in to that vicious guise.

“I can hardly call you a perk, though, can I?” he tells me. “More like a free prize that I didn’t want or ask for. I invited you on _one_ hunt because I felt sorry for you, and here we are, two years later, and I still can’t shake you.” My face burns hot with humiliation. This just seems to fuel the shapeshifter, though. “Although, I can’t really complain. You are the easiest fuck I’ve ever had.”

Sam lets out an outraged yell and I grit my teeth and fight back tears. My throat tightens with the effort, but I still stare the shapeshifter down and tell myself, _It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real._ But of course it’s real. The information the shapeshifter spews at Sam and I, it’s all too real and personal, and it can only come from Dean.

“Don’t listen to him, Harley!” Sam shouts. “This is how he gets off. This is his torture!”

It’s torture, all right. Hearing my worst fears and insecurities come out of Dean’s own mouth? It’s sick.

The shapeshifter laughs cruelly. “It’s just so effortless to get under your skin. Your pressure points are lit up like fireworks. Of course, you really only have two, don’t you? Your family, and Dean. I don’t blame you for sticking around. You’re a smart girl. You know Dean would never love you the way you love him. Oh, there I go again. I mean _me_. I’m too much of a…what’s the phrase? Wild spirit? Yet you stay, you come back for more hoping the pain of the rejection can mask the agony you feel over killing your family.”

“What?” The word escapes Sam’s mouth in a low voice. I shut my eyes, trying to block everything out.

“Don’t go there,” I tell the shapeshifter, but my voice doesn’t come out as strong and impacting as I would like.

To my surprise, the shapeshifter moves on. “You’re right. No point digging at old wounds, huh?” The way he looks at me, though, makes me think he’s ready to inflict new ones. “This job is hard enough. Trying to keep a sane mind while we kill all of those… _abominations_ that live in the dark. But hey, we meet the nicest people along the way, right? Like little Becky.”

“Leave her out of this,” Sam says in such a deathly even tone it’s terrifying. But not to the shapeshifter.

“But she’s so much fun,” the shapeshifter says excitedly. He goes behind a stack of crates and produces a pile of old tarps before kneeling down to eye level in front of me once more. “You know,” he says in a low, provocating tone, “Dean would bang her if he had the chance. Let’s see what happens.” He whips open one of the tarps and tosses it over me. I assume he does the same to Sam before leaving the room.

It takes barely half a minute after the shapeshifter leaves for Sam to start fighting to get out of the ropes. I hear him struggling. But I just sit, completely still under shelter of the tarp, and try to make sense of the throbbing in my chest that feels like the shapeshifter rammed a stake through my heart.

It would be different if the shapeshifter were just a regular monster, sensing our fears and using them against us. Maybe then it would be easier to convince myself that it was just part of the way he operates. But this guy…it’s like he takes pleasure in transforming into his victim and taking over their lives. He didn’t have that much time alone with Dean – surely not enough time to get all that information out of him. Yet he had it. How? Was he inside Dean’s mind in some way? If he were, that makes it worse. That means in some twisted way, those were Dean’s real thoughts.

“Damn it!” Sam shouts.

“That better be you, Sam, and not that freak of nature.”

My stomach lurches at the sound of his voice. It came from somewhere behind me, maybe in another room. I twist my head back and forth as far as the ropes allow me, and then give up because the tarp’s covering me anyway.

His voice scared me. No, it did more than that. It sickened me. Hearing him speak just brought back everything the shapeshifter said, and how can I forget that? How can I look at the real Dean again without hearing all those words in my head? That he was dreaming about having sex with Rebecca? That I’m basically just some easy slut at his disposal? That he never really wanted me around all this time? That the entire time I thought I was hiding the way I felt, or that Dean never sensed my problems, he knew all along and didn’t say a word?

Sam seems more forgiving than I am. He laughs with relief and says, “Yeah, it’s me. He went to Rebecca’s looking like you.”

“Well, he’s not stupid. He picked the handsome one.” Dean’s voice is closer now. He must be in the room. There’s the sound of rustling fabric and a faint click. A slicing motion. Then footsteps. Two pairs. And then the tarp is lifted off my head. My hair goes with it and falls back down, thankfully hiding my face. Without a word, Dean cuts the ropes from my wrists and neck. He touches my cheek softly and my body goes rigid. Was he in the building while the shapeshifter spoke? Does he know the damage he caused? When I don’t respond, he pulls away and stands up. “So, the shapeshifter decided to look like me?”

“Yeah, but he didn’t just look like you,” Sam says. “He _was_ you. Or he was becoming you.”

“What do you mean?” Dean says.

I stretch out my shoulders and rub my wrists and neck, where the tightly wound ropes were cutting into my skin.

“I don’t know. It was like he was downloading your thoughts and memories,” Sam says.

“You mean like the Vulcan Mind Meld?” Dean goes over to the boarded up window. I chance a glance at him and instantly regret it.

“Yeah, something like that.” Sam scratches his head. “Maybe that’s why he doesn’t just kill us. Maybe he needs to keep us alive. Psychic connection.”

“Come on, we gotta go,” Dean says. He makes a face when he reaches for his neck and finds it empty. The shapeshifter took everything but wrinkly jeans and a dirty gray t-shirt. “He’s probably at Rebecca’s already.” Just her name leaving his lips is enough to set my heart racing and blood boiling. I pull my knees to my chest, which draws Dean’s attention. “Harley, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I say curtly, and get to my feet. There’s no mistaking the sorrow in Sam’s face when I accidentally meet his gaze. Great. I don’t want his pity.

Dean breaks the boards off the wall with ease and we climb out of the narrow opening and shimmy our way to the floor of an alley. The main street is to our left.

“We need to find a phone, call the police,” Sam says.

“Whoa, not so fast,” Dean says. “You’re going to put an APB out on _me_.”

“Sorry,” Sam says.

Dean turns to me. “You’re okay with this?” All I can do is shrug, because honestly, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world compared to what I dream of doing to him now. He rolls his eyes. “This way.” We take off for the street.

There’s no sign of the Impala. We can only assume the shapeshifter has it. He’s got to keep up appearances, after all. So we make the trip to Rebecca’s house on foot. What with the shapeshifter’s lead and our slow method of travel, it’s no wonder we missed the show. Sam’s phone call worked. Rebecca’s front yard swarms with S.W.A.T. vehicles and various personnel, as well as the local law enforcement. There’s no way we’re getting anywhere near that house tonight.

It’s a restless night for us. Sam paces the motel room nervously while Dean sprawls out on one of the beds. Every so often they break the silence to speculate over one thing or another. As for me, I sit curled up uncomfortably on one of the chairs at the table, refusing to be in close proximity with Dean. I don’t care about this case anymore. I don’t care about Rebecca or her brother – not that I ever really did. For the first time in two years I seriously consider leaving Dean.

Late the next afternoon, the three of us pass a storefront window displaying televisions. Very old fashioned. As we walk by, the channel changes to a news report of a home invasion. A female reporter comes on screen.

“An anonymous tip led police to a home in the Central West End, where a S.W.A.T. team discovered a local woman bound and gagged,” the reporter states. “Her attacker, a white male, approximately twenty-four to thirty years of age, was discovered hiding in her home.” A police sketch of Dean replaces the female reporter.

Dean scoffs when he sees it. “Man! That’s not even a good picture.”

Sam glances around the sidewalk cautiously. “It’s good enough.” He keeps walking, and I follow him. From behind, Dean groans, “Man!” before catching up.

Now that the authorities – and the public – have a description of Dean, it would be better for us to stay hidden. Our main priority, however, is finding the Impala. Last night while Sam was worrying about Rebecca and I was worrying about Dean, Dean was worrying about his car.

We turn down an alley and Dean splashes through a puddle. He curses and stops to kick water off his shoe.

“Come on,” Sam says. “They said _attempted_ murder. At least we know–”

“That I didn’t kill her,” Dean finishes.

“We’ll check with Rebecca, see if she’s all right,” Sam says.

“All right, but first I wanna find that handsome devil and kick the holy crap out him.”

Sam stops in his tracks. “We have no weapons. No silver bullets.”

Dean scowls. “Sam, the guy’s walking around with my face, okay? It’s a little personal. I want to find him.”

“Okay,” Sam says, resting his hands on his hips. “Where do we look?”

“Well, we could start with the sewers,” Dean suggests.

“We have no weapons,” Sam reminds Dean. “He stole our guns, we need more. We need the car.”

“I’m betting he drove it over to Rebecca’s,” Dean says. “I didn’t see it yesterday, but we didn’t really stop to look.”

“The news said he fled on foot,” Sam says. “I bet it’s still parked there.”

Dean huffs. “The thought of him driving my car…” he grumbles.

Sam allows Dean a moment of wallowing. “All right, come on.”

“It’s killing me!” Dean complains.

“Let it go,” Sam says.

Neither one of them mentions that I haven’t said a word since we escaped the sewers. I keep silent as we make our way on foot, yet again, to Rebecca’s house.

“Oh, there she is!” Dean says with relief when we turn the corner one street over from Rebecca’s. He pats the hood of the Impala lovingly. “Finally, something went right.”

He spoke too soon. Up ahead a police car makes a left hand turn, abruptly brakes, then speeds into reverse before turning toward us, lights flashing and sirens blaring.

“Oh, crap,” Sam mutters.

We turn to run the opposite direction but come across yet another police car. I’m so numb I don’t even feel the adrenaline.

“This way, this way!” Dean whispers as he moves along a yard toward a fence.

“You go, I’ll hold them off,” Sam says. He gives me a little shove. “Go with him.”

“What are you talking about?” Dean says. “They’ll catch you.”

“Look, they can’t hold me. Just go, keep out of sight. Meet me at Rebecca’s.” Sam glances back at the police car. Dean nods and pulls himself up on the fence. “Dean, stay out of the sewers.” Without a word, Dean hops over the fence. “I mean it!” Sam calls.

“Yeah, yeah,” comes Dean’s voice from the other side.

Sam turns to me. “Make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid, okay?” When I don’t say anything Sam puts his hand on my shoulder and lowers his voice. “I know you’re still thinking about what the shapeshifter said yesterday. You have to know that wasn’t Dean.”

“Just go, Sam,” I say quietly, and hoist myself over the fence.

No sooner have my feet touched the ground when the cops appear. “Don’t move! Keep your hands where I can see them!” one of them shouts. Dean and I move to the shadows of a large tree and watch them lead Sam to one of the cars through the cracks in the fence. They put him in the back seat and drive away. The other police car remains.

“They’ll question him and probably release him tomorrow,” Dean says. I don’t respond. We sit there in the underneath the tree, waiting for the second cop to leave. We figure as soon as it does, we can get the Impala.

We end up waiting all night. We fall asleep in the bushes and wake in the early hours of the morning to the sound of one of the neighbors screaming about burnt toast. Dean and I climb back over the fence and walk over to the Impala. “I’m sorry, Sam, but you know me. I just can’t wait,” Dean mutters to himself while he picks out a few weapons from the trunk. He shoves a gun in my hands roughly and snaps, “Okay, Harley, what the hell is your problem?”

I snatch the gun. “Excuse me?”

“You’ve been moping around ever since we were captured by the shapeshifter. What’s your deal?”

“Nothing.” I slam the trunk and look around for the nearest sewer hatch, not questioning our change in plans. Not questioning that I’m going against the one thing Sam asked me to do. “We need to hurry.”

“No,” Dean says. He grabs my arm. “Something happened. Did the shapeshifter say something? Did he do anything to you?”

“Dean, this isn’t the time. Can we just go? I want to hurry up and get out of here.” I don’t give him a chance to keep pestering me. I walk down the street and struggle to heave the manhole cover away from its groove. Dean silently yanks it away in one fluid motion.

We search the sewers in silence. After what feels like miles, we come across a damp chamber filled with candles and chains. Amongst the dripping sewer water are piles of skin and blood. I shudder as we step carefully into the chamber, guns at the ready.

In the far corner is a large sheet covering some sort of lump. The only reason I think it might be a human is because for some odd reason the shapeshifter covered Sam and I in a similar fashion. Dean goes over and removes the sheet, revealing Rebecca. Her hands and feet are tied with rope and there’s a bruise forming under one of her eyes.

Dean takes out his knife and cuts her binds. She whimpers the entire time like an injured dog. “What happened?”

“I was walking home and everything just went white,” she says. She curls up and starts to cry. “Someone hit me over the head. I wound up here just in time to see that…thing turn into me. How is that even possible?” she wails, and bursts into a loud fit of tears.

Dean lays a comforting hand on her shoulder but I roll my eyes. “Oh, my God, Rebecca!” I snap at her. She promptly stops crying and her eyes widen. “Would you get a hold of yourself and stop crying at every tiny thing like a little bitch?”

“The hell, Harley?” Dean says. But Rebecca sort of proves my point when she starts to bawl again. He tries to console her. “Okay, okay. It’s okay. Come on. Can you walk?” Rebecca nods weakly and Dean helps her to her feet. “Okay, we’ve got to hurry. Sam went to see you.”

Only then do I realize our sense of urgency. Rebecca said the shapeshifter turned into _her_ , and right now Sam is at her house, oblivious to all this. I give Sam a call, but I have little reception in the sewers and Sam doesn’t pick up anyway. We hurry back to the manhole cover by Rebecca’s house as fast as Rebecca will let us.

It’s dark by the time we resurface. As soon as we turn the corner onto Rebecca’s street, lights flicker inside the house followed by a loud crash. I look at Dean, who still supports Rebecca. “Go!” he says.

I take off up the lawn and burst through the front door. Sam and the shapeshifter – who is now disguised as Dean again – are fighting in the lounge. The shapeshifter has Sam pinned to the pool table, his hands tightening around Sam’s neck. Sam gets hold of a pool cue and whacks the shapeshifter over the head. It doesn’t do much but shatter in half.

“Hey, asshole!” I shout.

The shapeshifter turns around. Upon seeing me with my gun pointed at him, he smirks. All I see is Dean, taunting me with that smirk, and I unload all of my anger and frustration by lodging two bullets cleanly into the shapeshifter’s chest, then another two for good measure as it writhes on the floor.

I feel slightly liberated as I watch the life ebb out of the shapeshifter, out of Dean.

“Sam!” Rebecca squeals as she and Dean arrive. She rushes over to Sam and helps him up. Sure, now she’s strong enough to walk on her own.

Dean raises his eyebrows at me as he passes, on his way to the shapeshifter’s lifeless body, and yanks the Samulet off its neck. He nods to Sam, who returns the gesture, and the four of us stare at the body while the bullet wounds ooze blood onto the expensive, plush cream carpet. I don’t even feel sorry about that.

Sam, Dean and I take off so Rebecca can call the cops. There’s nothing we can do but leave the shapeshifter there for the police to find. Unfortunately, he’s still in Dean’s form. I suppose Dean won’t have to worry about being a fugitive from the law anymore now that he’s legally dead.

I manage to avoid talking to Sam and Dean about things they both feel it necessary to bring up while we’re at the motel that night. I accomplish this by never letting myself be alone with either of them. Not only am I just trying to avoid the situation altogether, I honestly don’t really know what to make of it all. I need time to work through everything. Figure out what the hell is going on in my head.

The following morning we stop by Rebecca’s house on our way out of town, at Sam’s insistence. With the windows down, I can hear Sam and Rebecca’s conversation from where I sit in the back seat of the car. Dean leans against the hood, looking over a map. Sam had no choice but to take Dean’s advice and be straight up with Rebecca about his alternative life.

“So, this is what you do?” Rebecca says. “You and your brother and your…friend? You hunt down these kinds of things?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Sam says.

“I can’t believe it. I mean, I saw it with my own eyes. And, I mean…” Rebecca pauses for a moment. “Does everybody at school…nobody knows that you do this?”

“No,” Sam says.

“Did Jessica know?”

I have to look over at them now. Sam doesn’t answer her. He stares off at the house, his hands on his hips. Finally, he says, “No, she didn’t.”

“Must be lonely,” Rebecca says.

“Oh, no. No, it’s not so bad.” A smile plays on his lips. His eyes find mine, and then Dean’s. “Anyway, what can I do? It’s my family.”

The four of us laugh gently, but each one is different. Rebecca does it because the moment called for it. Sam’s laugh is for the inevitable reason that he can’t escape his destiny. Dean laughs triumphant, because he knew he was right. And me, well, maybe I just want to take advantage of the last time I’ll smile for a very, very long time.

“You know, Zack and me, and everybody at school, we really miss you,” Rebecca says. She wraps her arms around Sam, and he pats her solemnly.

“Yeah, me too,” he says sadly.

Rebecca breaks their hug. “Well, will you call sometime?”

“It might not be for a little while.”

She nods in understanding and waves goodbye to Dean and me. Dean waves back. I pretend like I didn’t see. As Sam approaches the car, Dean asks, “So, what about Zack?”

“Cops are blaming this Dean Winchester guy for Emily’s murder,” Sam says with a slightly reproachful look on his face. “They found the murder weapon in the guy’s lair, Zack’s clothes stained with her blood. Now they’re thinking maybe the surveillance tape was tampered with.” Dean rolls his eyes. Sam scoffs. “Yeah. Becca says Zack will be released soon.”

“You know what I don’t understand?” I surprise myself by saying. Dean and Sam stare at me, their faces shocked that I willingly speak. “Rebecca said Zack left her house after midnight the night Emily was murdered. If the shapeshifter showed up at Zack’s house around ten that night and killed Emily, wouldn’t the surveillance tape show the real Zack coming home _again_? Especially if the shapeshifter never left through the front door?”

Sam and Dean exchange glances. “I guess they could just argue that Zack left out the back after murdering Emily and came through the front door later,” Sam says with a shrug. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. Zack’s going to be cleared of all charges.”

“Yeah,” I say quietly.

The boys get in the front seat. When we’re on the highway, Dean looks over at Sam. “Sorry, man,” he says.

“About what?”

“I really wish things could be different, you know?” Dean sighs. “I wish you could just be…Joe College.”

“No, that’s okay.” Sam turns and faces the window. “You know, the truth is, at Stanford, deep down, I never really fit in.”

Dean smirks. “Well, that’s ’cause you’re a freak.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“Well, I’m a freak, too. So is Harley. We’re right there with ya, all the way,” Dean says.

“Yeah, I know you are.”

“You know, I gotta say. I’m sorry I’m going to miss it,” Dean says.

“Miss what?” Sam asks.

Dean tilts his head to the side. “How many chances am I gonna have to see my own funeral?”

They exchange smiles. I stare out of my window, watching the road fly by in a blur of black asphalt. I wonder if, right at this moment, knowing what I know about the things inside Dean’s head, Sam and I were standing over Dean’s casket, would I shed a tear? Would I care if Dean were gone? Honestly, I’m not sure if I would.

I was devastated when I accidentally killed my little brother. I was confused and miserable when my mother slit her wrists. And since I was older when my dad died, I was distraught but a little more understanding. But the pain I feel right now, it’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before.

As I rub my chest, wondering what it could be, it comes to me.

This is what a broken heart feels like.


	10. Asylum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm very proud of this chapter. It's my third favorite, however. 
> 
> I know it's just the Asylum episode, but I've added way more as Harley ventures out into the world. I do my best to add things that reflect HER personality, not just regurgitate the script with the personality of the boys.
> 
> This chapter also explores Sam and Harley's friendship (which grows more next chapter as well) and questions Dean and Harley's relationship. 
> 
> Towards the end you'll get a good look at the past, as well as some nice foreshadowing.

A light shaking brings me out of slumber sometime during the night. My eyes flutter open and register Sam’s face inches from mine in the darkness, his hand still on my shoulder.

“Sam?” I say groggily as I sit up and rub my face.

“Shh,” he says, pressing his finger to his lips.

“What’s going on?” I whisper.

He beckons to me silently. I slide out of bed, careful not to wake Dean – which isn’t hard, since I refuse to let our bodies touch – and follow Sam outside.

We sit on the curb in front of our motel room. The night is clear, crisp. There isn’t a trace of clouds in the sky, revealing thousands of shimmering stars and a shining moon. We drove west out of St. Louis and stopped in Columbia, near the Missouri River. If I listen very carefully I can hear the gentle babbling of the water. I rub my face again and yawn, waiting for Sam to tell me what this is about.

“We need to talk,” he says quietly.

“Yeah, I figured that much.” I feel the dread of finally talking about the incident with the shapeshifter creep up inside me. I really walked right into this one. Something about the way Sam keeps his eyes fixed straight ahead, staring at nothing in particular, tells me that this might not be about that, though. “What’s going on, Sam?”

He takes a deep breath, preparing himself. “Look, I’m going to tell you this stuff because I don’t think I can tell Dean, all right? And I trust you.”

“Okay,” I say, only minimally confused.

Sam scrunches up his face, puts his head in his hands. Whatever it is, it must be serious. It’s got to be about Jessica. Nothing would make Sam this uneasy. He runs his hands back through his hair. “You know I get nightmares.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t think they’re just…nightmares. I think they could be visions.”

“What?” I gasp. “Sam, you’re not serious?”

“Hear me out, okay?” Sam looks away, and I remember he trusts me with this. “I had this recurring dream before, about Jessica. About her death. I dreamt about it for days, and then it actually happened.”

I try to think back to our trip to Jericho. Sam seemed fine those nights before we took him back to Stanford. The only time he appeared to have disturbing dreams was _after_ Jessica died. But I don’t say this. “Is that why you were beating yourself up about it?”

“Yeah,” he says softly. “If I was there, if I hadn’t left, maybe she would still be alive.”

“Sam.” I let my words die. I was going to say that he _was_ there. From what Sam told us the day after the fire, he was already lying in bed when the blood started dripping. And after listening to John tell the story of how his wife died, something tells me that even if Sam never went with Dean and I, there was nothing he could’ve done. If that demon wanted Jessica dead, she would be.

Now, how do I tell him that while making him feel better?

“I know,” he says, his voice barely higher than a whisper. “Maybe there would’ve been nothing I could do, even if I was there.” Better that he comes to that conclusion himself. “But I think I’m being given a second chance.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I think I just had another vision. There was this woman. She was inside her bedroom, screaming for help.” He turns to me, takes my hands in his. “Harley, if this woman is in danger, I have a chance to save her. I have a chance to make things right. I didn’t do anything when I saw Jessica’s death. I can change that now.”

“I don’t know, Sam,” I say doubtfully. I’m not doubting Sam, per se. Visions, a third eye, fortune telling. Every culture has stories on seeing the future. I just think he’s grasping at this. Grasping at any chance of reconciliation because he didn’t make the right choice the first time around. “Do you even know where this woman is?”

And that’s where I get him. He lets go of my hands and looks at the ground. “Not entirely. But the room, the house, it looked familiar. I didn’t just see her. It was sort of like a movie. The vision panned up the front lawn, then shifted inside the house, switched to her bedroom. I got a good look at everything.”

“Sam, even if you figured out where this house was, how could we get there in time? The way you describe it, she’s in danger _now_.”

Sam shakes his head. “No. I got this feeling that it was _about_ to happen. We may still have enough time.”

I sigh. I’m not going to deny Sam this. I’ll support him, mainly because I know Dean won’t, and Sam needs someone on his side. But if I plan on leaving, I’m not the one he needs. “You should tell Dean. Give him the benefit of the doubt.”

Sam shakes his head again. “I can’t tell him the truth. He’s too hard-headed. Likes things straightforward. And if it comes from me?” He blows a huff of air out of his nose. “That will really send him over the edge.”

For some reason, my thoughts stray back to the shapeshifter. I’d really be opening up a can of worms by asking, but I need to know. Because Sam’s reasons for not telling Dean about this would make sense if the shapeshifter were right. “Do you think what the shapeshifter said is true?”

Sam looks down at me. “That’s really bothering you, isn’t it?”

I shrug. “Can you blame me? After what the he said about me?”

“I don’t think any of it was true,” Sam says. “I think it was based on truth.” I shoot Sam a scornful look. “Listen. We all have fears. We all have terrible thoughts that we think in anger. I think the shapeshifter picked up on those when he went through Dean’s mind. He picked up on Dean’s fears, on our fears, even, and extremely exaggerated Dean’s anger in order to use it against us.” Sam nudges my arm teasingly. “You know Dean’s got plenty of anger to go around.”

“It just seemed so real. Logical,” I insist. “Dean could be jealous that you left to go to college. Resentful that he stayed behind and worked his ass of for what seemed like nothing. And then me?” I find myself searching Sam’s eyes, tears welling up in my own. I think Sam’s the only person I feel comfortable enough, safe enough, to cry around, and I admit something I never dared say out loud before. “God, Sam, I love Dean, and he just threw it in my face.”

“Dean didn’t, Harley. The shapeshifter did.”

“Does it matter?” The tears spill over run down my cheeks. “Everything he said makes sense. And he had to get it from _somewhere_.” I wipe my nose on my sleeve. “I can picture it. That September my dad died. Almost three years ago, now.” Has it really been that long? I pull my hair over my shoulder and yank on the ends. “I drove to the Roadhouse to find John. Give him the Colt. The gun that my dad died over so your dad could fight the demon that killed your mom. Do you think Dean thought about that when he asked me to go on that very first hunt with him? Or…when he tried to shake me all those years after? If he didn’t care about me – why did he bother – saving me from the Benders? Why didn’t he just – let me rot in that cage – and die?” I really sob now. My body shakes from trying to breathe and talk and cry all at once. “He had plenty of times – to let me go after that. Why would he pretend to care? For sex? Did he really keep me around – because I was that _easy_ , Sam?”

Sam reaches over and folds me into his arms. I press my face into his chest and cry. I haven’t cried this hard since my dad died, because just like Dean, I never cry. Not like this. Now I realize that maybe I only cry over losing the people I love.

My tears soak a large, wet patch in the center of Sam’s shirt in minutes, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He just strokes my hair and lets me get it all out. It’s only by the time my sobs are replaced by hiccups that I remember we originally came out here for Sam’s problem.

“I’m sorry,” I mumble into his shirt. “I kind of stole your thunder.”

He gives a half-hearted chuckle. “There wasn’t much thunder to steal. But listen to me, Harley.” Sam pushes me away from him, with his hands holding my shoulders steady at arm’s length. “I meant what I said in Jericho. Dean is different now that he has you. Whatever the shapeshifter told us is just a sick, twisted form of the truth. For all I know, Dean thought those things about us in a moment of weakness and moved on, and the shapeshifter took them and turned them into a Broadway production.” Sam rubs my shoulder with his thumb. “And the way I heard it, you and Dean fought a lot. There were bound to be some horrible things you both thought about saying to each other but didn’t.”

“I guess,” I mumble. I sniff and wipe my nose again. Hiccup a few times in the silence.

“I don’t doubt Dean loves you,” Sam says.

“He’s had two years to let me know, and he hasn’t,” I say.

“He’s never loved anyone before.” He gently pushes my hair out of my face. “Cut him some slack.”

“Then you need to do the same and tell him about your visions,” I say, jumping on the opportunity to change the subject. I wanted answers. I didn’t want Sam to give me reasons to stay.

Sam chews on his lip. “Okay, I’ll tell him in the morning. Only if you promise to give him another chance.”

“How?” I whisper. “Every night I go to sleep with the shapeshifter’s words in my head. Words that came from someone that looked exactly like Dean.” I rub my temples. “I think I need some time away from him.”

“Running isn’t the answer,” Sam says.

“I’m not running. Just…taking a break.” I pick at a loose thread on my sweats. “I’ll try to help you find the house. But if you find it, you and Dean need to go alone.”

Defeated, Sam nods. We get up and go back inside. The sky began to lighten, so I figure I will only get a few more hours of sleep, if I can manage to fall asleep at all. I ease myself under the sheets. The movement of the mattress makes Dean shift around. Without waking, he turns and buries his face in my neck. I sigh. At least I don’t feel angry. I guess that’s an improvement.

I wake up to find Dean at the table, working on my laptop. Sam is still in bed, but it looks like he stayed up since our talk. He has the motel scratch pad in hand and he sketches something on it. I watch him draw while our conversation slowly replays in my head.

“Good, you’re up,” Dean tells me. “I’ve been cruising some websites. I think I found a few candidates for our next gig. A fishing trawler found off the coast of Cali – its crew vanished. You always wanted to see the ocean, here’s your chance.” He clicks a few times on the track pad. “And, uh, we got some cattle mutilations in West Texas. Hey!” I tear my eyes away from Sam and stare tiredly at Dean. “Am I boring you with this hunting evil stuff?”

“No,” I say.

“What about you, Picasso?” Dean says.

“I’m listening,” Sam says without looking up. “Keep going.”

Dean goes back to the laptop, barely satisfied. “And here, a Sacramento man shot himself in the head. _Three_ times.” I give Dean a somewhat interested look so he’ll stay off my back. Sam’s still preoccupied, though. Dean waves his hand wildly at him. “Any of these things blowin’ up your skirt, pal?”

“Wait.” Sam sits upright and holds his drawing in front of him. “I’ve seen this.”

“Seen what?” Dean asks. Sam gets out of bed and crosses the room to his duffel bag. “What are you doing?”

Sam searches around until he finds an old, worn out photo. He looks from the photo to his drawing, then back to the photo. “I know where we have to go next.” Our eyes meet and I know he found the house. I honestly didn’t expect it to come so easily.

“Where is it?” I ask.

“Where is _what_?” Dean demands, the wording of my question clearly throwing him off.

“Back home. Back to Kansas.” Sam joins me on my bed and hands me the photo and the drawing, which is of a large tree. I compare the two and find that the tree in Sam’s drawing is nearly identical to the large oak planted near a pale blue and white colonial revival house. In front of the house, on the wide front lawn, is John and Mary Winchester with their arms around a young Dean and a happy infant Sam.

“Okay, random,” Dean says. “Where’d that come from?”

“All right, um, this photo was taken in front of our old house, right?” Sam nods to me, and I hand the photo over to Dean. “The house where Mom died?”

Dean narrows his eyes. “Yeah.”

“And it didn’t burn down, right? I mean, not completely. They rebuilt it?”

“I guess so, yeah.” Dean gives the photo back. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Sam looks to me for support. I nod in encouragement. “Okay, look. This is going to sound crazy, but…the people who live in our old house – I think they might be in danger.”

“Why would you think that?” Dean asks.

“Uh…it’s just, um…” Sam stumbles on his words, so I pat his arm comfortingly. “Look, just trust me on this, okay?”

“Wait, trust you?” Dean looks back and forth between us. Sam just nods. “Come on, man, that’s weak. You’ve got to give me a little bit more than that.”

Sam shrugs. “I can’t really explain it is all.”

“Well, tough.” Dean slams my laptop shut, and once again I have to bite my tongue to keep from snapping at him about being careful with it. “I’m not going anywhere until you do,” he says defiantly, sitting back and folding his arms over his chest. He waits expectantly while Sam stares at his feet.

“I have these nightmares,” Sam says.

“I’ve noticed,” Dean says simply.

“And sometimes…they come true.”

Dean’s eyes widen. “Come again?”

“Look, Dean…I dreamt about Jessica’s death for days before it happened,” Sam begins, but Dean holds up his hand.

“Sam, people have weird dreams, man. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.”

Sam shoots me an I-Told-You-So look before trying to explain further. “No. I dreamt about the blood. Her on the ceiling. The fire. Everything. And I didn’t do anything about it because I didn’t believe it. And now I’m dreaming about that tree, about our house, and about some woman inside screaming for help. I mean, that’s where it all started, man. This has to mean something.”

“I don’t know,” Dean says. He sounds overwhelmed, as Sam thought he might.

“What do you mean you don’t know, Dean? This woman might be in danger. This might even be the demon that killed Mom and Jessica!”

“All right, just slow down, would you?” Dean presses his fingers to the bridge of his nose, then gets to his feet and begins pacing the floor. “First you tell me that you’ve got the Shining? And then you tell me that I’ve got to go back home? Especially when…” He stops with his back to us.

“When what?” Sam asks.

Dean turns around slowly. “When I swore to myself that I would never go back there.”

“Look, Dean, we have to check this out,” Sam says, deliberately softening his tone. “Just to make sure.”

Dean looks at me. “Did you know about this?”

Reluctantly, I nod. “He told me last night.”

“And what do you think?”

His question throws me off guard. He wants my opinion, which is perfectly normal. To him. Nothing has changed in his eyes, only mine. I try to believe the things Sam said about the shapeshifter. That doesn’t mean I don’t still need time apart, though. “I think it’s something worth you two checking out.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, then does a sort of double take. “What do you mean ‘you two’? You’re coming, aren’t you?”

I have to avoid looking at him and Sam when I say quietly, “No, I’m not.”

“What the hell?” Dean says loudly.

“I need to be on my own for a while.” I try to pretend I didn’t see the quick flash of pain on Dean’s face before it’s rapidly replaced by anger seconds before he storms out of the motel room, slamming the door behind him.

“I told you,” Sam says in a low voice.

I shake my head as I get off the bed and start packing up my things. It’s probably a good idea for me to be gone by the time Dean gets back.

Twenty minutes later, I walk alone along the streets of Columbia, Missouri. I have no car, no place to go. Just the lingering sensation of Sam’s hug on my skin and the pain on Dean’s face in my head.

There’s a bus stop a few blocks from the motel. I don’t go to it, though, because I don’t know when the bus will arrive and I will feel incredibly embarrassed if Sam and Dean drive by on their way to Lawrence while I sit there. So I keep walking, my feet carrying me deeper and deeper into the city, only aware that I head east and I know the boys will head west.

I come across a train station and an image of New Orleans floats in front of my eyes. For a fleeting moment I think I’ll go there. I mean, why not? I don’t have any plans. I didn’t get to go the last time Dean and I were headed that way. Then, I grip my stomach, because it feels like someone kicked me in the gut with an iron boot. New Orleans is out, then. I’ll have to pick a destination that doesn’t remind me of Dean.

Maybe New York. I could do with the city. Fast paced, always moving. It would be a nice change from all the back roads and trees. Or Las Vegas. I could just drink and no one would question me. Yeah, I could do that anywhere, but I’ve never been to Vegas. Or maybe, I can pull out all the stops and travel outside of the United States. Canada. Mexico. Europe. I walk up to the ticket window, bubbling with the excitement of possible choices, and find that I feel unequivocally, irrevocably lost.

“Can I help you?” the male attendant asks. I stare at him, my mind now blank when just a moment ago it was filled with possibilities.

“One-way ticket to New…Orleans.” My brain was thinking New York, but for some reason my mouth said New Orleans and didn’t correct itself. 

I pay for my ticket and find the platform. The Amtrak leaves at 10:20, so I’ve got about fifteen minutes to kill. I buy a coffee from a train vendor and sip on it while I stare at the empty tracks, all the while trying not to let myself wish I was taking this trip with Dean.

Once in my seat on the train, my wish changes from wanting Dean with me to wanting the iPod the kid across the aisle has. I should have been smart enough to pick one up before, but there was really no need when I always had music in the Impala. Maybe I’ll get one in New Orleans. Yeah, I’m definitely going to get one in New Orleans, because an hour and a half into the train ride I can’t stand listening to silence or the sound of the other passengers talking about the hurricane that struck southern Louisiana in August of last year. A hurricane that I was too ignorant to find out about before deciding to travel south. It’s got to still be a mess down there.

I won’t have to listen to it all for long, though. My cellphone beeps, distracting me, and my heart lurches. At first I think it’s Dean, then I realize he would have absolutely nothing to say to me. So it must be Sam, updating me. They would be in Lawrence by now.

Turns out, it’s neither. It’s a text from an Unavailable Subject, which translates easily to John Winchester, and the message is “42, -89”. I stare at the four numbers for a moment, wondering why John would bother texting me directly instead of Sam or Dean. Or why he would bother getting in contact with us at all.

John doesn’t know we split up. I try to think of all the reasons why that text message would come to me rather than the boys but I come up empty. John doesn’t do things without a specific purpose. So that leaves me to think, does John know I’m not with Sam and Dean? If that’s the case, that means two things: he’s got tabs on us, and there’s something he needs me to look into without them. And if he’s got tabs on us, that means he knows where his sons are. Specifically: Lawrence, Kansas. Their hometown. The place where it all started, as Sam said. This can’t be a coincidence.

I find Sam’s contact in my cell and my finger hovers over the green phone icon. I feel like I have an obligation to let him know that John may be in Lawrence, or somewhere nearby, since this is the first communication we’ve had from John in months. If I told him, though, what good would that do? If John is really in Lawrence when they are and he still isn’t making contact directly, there’s got to be a reason. Confusion wages war inside me as the screen darkens. I close the phone.

The train pulls into the New Orleans station an hour later. I was right about the city still being in ruins. The debris has been cleared out, but it will be years before the buildings and streets and atmosphere is built back to its original grandeur. I find a coffee shop with internet access and locate the coordinates. My heart sinks as I read the two words on the screen: Rockford, Illinois. A couple hundred miles from where I just was two and a half hours ago. I’m so angry at John that I almost don’t go. He’s not my father. I don’t have a responsibility to him.

I pull up the local Rockford paper on the internet and find that there might be something worth looking into, despite my anger. In an article from the previous week, a cop, Walter Kelly, and his partner responded to a call at the Roosevelt Asylum. Later that night, Kelly goes home, shoots his wife, then turns the gun on himself and blows his brains out. I dig my dad’s journal out of my bag and find that my dad earmarked a page with the name of the asylum written at the top, next to the word ‘Haunted?’. Under this is a list of seven unconfirmed sightings and their dates as well as two previous deaths. A faded, yellowed newspaper clipping is paper-clipped to the page, with the headline ‘TEENAGERS DIE IN ABANDONED HOSPITAL FIRE’. The last death was before I would have started going on hunts with my dad. For some reason things are starting up again. And as far as I can remember, my dad investigated the Asylum on his own. John wasn’t involved. So how did he know to kick me the coordinates?

I stomp my way back to the train station to purchase a ticket to Illinois. I’m not entirely thrilled that I have to go hunt a spirit that my dad couldn’t even kill, all by myself. But this is what I wanted. Time away from Dean.

The ride north seems to go quicker than it did going south, but maybe that’s because deep down I dread this job. I’ve never worked on my own before, ever. And I wonder, if beneath all this dread and hurt and anger and loneliness, I detect just the tiniest bit of fear?

It’s almost dark by the time I reach Rockford. I hit some blue collar bar down the street from the police station in hopes of finding Daniel Gunderson, Walter Kelly’s partner. There aren’t many customers in the place, which makes it easy to spot the graying man on a barstool, shoulders slouched, nursing a bottle of beer. I sidle up to him, drop my bag silently on the floor, order a beer for myself. He doesn’t even look up.

“Hey,” I say. “You’re Daniel Gunderson, right? You’re a cop?”

Gunderson wearily lifts his head. “Yeah?” he says, as if he couldn’t care less.

“I’m Natalie Tufnell, with the Chicago Tribune,” I say, trying not to sound too happy or too sad. Just the right amount of detached reporter. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about your partner?”

“Yeah, I do,” Gunderson grunts. “I’m just trying to have a drink here.”

“It won’t take long,” I promise. “I just want to hear the story in your words.”

“My words?” Gunderson repeats, appalled. “A week ago my partner was sitting in that chair, and now he’s dead. And you’re gonna ambush me here?”

I back off, look down into my glass. “I’m sorry.” I glance at Gunderson’s beer, which he hasn’t touched since I sat down. It looks flat. “Can I get you another beer?”

Gunderson eyes me, but he doesn’t object. I nod to the bartender and he sets down a fresh bottle in front of the officer. I raise my own. “To your partner.”

Gunderson clinks his glass against mine. “To Kelly.” He takes a long drag on his beer. “He had a bright future. He was a rookie. Even keeled, top of his class. Beautiful wife. They had their fights, like everyone. Mostly smooth sailing, though. They were talking about having kids.” He shakes his head somberly.

I sit in silence, afraid to move. A simple beer must work wonders. Instead of talking, I think. It seems like Kelly had a typical home life. So either he had some deep-seated crazy waiting to burst out, or something else did it to him.

“Still hard to believe he did what he did,” Gunderson says. Good. Now I have to figure out how to steer the conversation in the path of the Asylum.

“It must be hard,” I say.

Gunderson chugs down a few gulps of beer, almost draining it. “Yeah. Never would have figured him for suicidal.”

“You didn’t notice any signs?” I venture carefully.

He shakes his head. Finishes off the last of his beer. He looks at the old beer he had when I walked in like he considers drinking it now. “I guess being in that place could change you.”

My heart races. I need to play this right. “What was it like in there?”

“Terrible. Awful.” Gunderson seems to get over himself and takes up his old beer. “I teased Kelly about the Asylum when we were on patrol. Told him ghost stories. How the place is haunted. Then we chased some kids all the way to the South Wing. Split up, got them out. Come to think of it, Kelly didn’t look so good when we met up outside.” He takes a swig of the old beer and grimaces at the taste.

“Huh” is all I say.

I let Gunderson get back to his sulking and find a motel for the night. I try not to think about how strange it is to be alone, with just a backpack full of clothes and a duffel with a couple of odds and ends. There was no point in packing up everything I had accumulated when I split off from the boys because I knew that eventually I would be back. I just hope that what I managed to bring will be enough to fight off whatever spirit is wreaking havoc in the Roosevelt Asylum.

At dawn I rise and shower and get ready to explore the Asylum. My first stop will be the South Wing, since that’s where the cops found the kids last week and my dad also happened to make mention of it in his journal. I borrow a working car from a junkyard after some rigorous haggling and an outrageous deposit and drive over to Roosevelt Asylum.

Even in the early morning, the Asylum radiates a fair share of creepiness. I park alongside a rusty chain-link fence with a redundant amount of ‘NO TRESPASSING’ signs plastered along it. A part of the fence hangs open, large enough for me to squeeze through. I walk up along a cracked concrete path, staring up at the haunting building with broken windows and stained bricks.

Inside the desecrated lobby are double doors leading to different wings of the Asylum. I circle the graffitied lobby slowly, each footstep sending up small clouds of dusts as I make my way along the tattered rug. The doors to the North and East Wing are still safely chained shut, but the busted padlock of the South Wing sits on a pile of chain in front of the slightly ajar doors.

I hesitate before passing through. In the newspaper article in my dad’s journal from 1972, three kids broke into the Asylum – the South Wing, specifically – and only one survived. The survivor said one of his friends suddenly went mad and started torching the place. Judging by the state of the other locks, still old and rusted shut, I’d say the heart of all the problems stemmed from the South Wing. I glance down at the padlock on the floor. Were the chains keeping people out, or keeping something in?

Armed with an EMF reader, which I’m thankful to have, not because I intentionally packed it but because it was already inside the duffel when I was gathering my things in the motel in Missouri, I step into the rotting hall. The air is thick and musty, and if I didn’t know better I’d say this place had been empty for decades. I walk through slowly, taking in my empty surroundings of cold, grime-covered stone walls and deserted rooms. An old, broken wheelchair sits in the center of the floor. I edge around it. The EMF beeps quietly, alerting me to the status of the power but not that there are any spirits around. It could just be the wrong time of day. Certain spirits come out at particular times. Of course, the freaks come out at night.

I turn the corner and come across a large room. Above the wide open doors is a sign labeling the room ‘Ellicott Ward’. Rusted cots with decaying bedding line one wall. Various components of rusted medical equipment from the sixties scatters the empty space, some of it ghastly looking. Strangely poignant garbage is strewn across the floor – a single shoe, the head of a plastic doll.

An electrode sitting on top of an old ECT machine catches my eye. I pick it up and shudder. I can’t even begin to imagine the types of torture disguised as treatment that went on here. Electroshock. Lobotomies. All of the twisted stuff they used to do to people was enough to derange anyone.

Carefully I set the electrode back where I found it. Then I stop. Maybe that’s my first clue. I thought there was a chance that a ghost possessed Kelly and that kid from the seventies and made them do those awful things. But maybe the spirits are just driving people insane. Forcing anyone who crosses their path to suffer the same fate they did.

I notice the edge of a small, dusty faded sign on the wall behind a pile of boxes. As quietly as I can I shove them to the side, then reach out with my sleeve pulled over my hand to wipe the grime away from the inscription. I nod at my second clue. Chief of Staff, Sanford Ellicott, M.D.

Since it’s pretty clear I’m not getting anywhere in the way of spirits, I might as well head back to town and do a little digging on Dr. Sanford Ellicott and see what really went on behind the doors of the South Wing of Roosevelt Asylum. I return to the lobby, step out into the warm morning sun, and take a grateful breath of fresh air. I may not have encountered any ghosts, but there was definitely something going on in there that made my skin crawl.

Arbitrarily I think about how I’m not as strong without Dean by my side, but I’m quick to push that thought from my mind. There’s nothing I can’t do myself. Hell, independence is my middle name.

Right after train-wreck.

During breakfast I browse the internet on my laptop for general history on the town, the Asylum, and Dr. Ellicott himself. As I suspect, I don’t hit the jackpot. Back then, people paid for secrecy, and it was a whole lot easier to falsify documents. I laugh a little, feeling the weight of the small leather wallet full of fake I.D.s grow heavy in my pocket. Still, an asylum was a place of ambiguity. Any records kept most likely wouldn’t be real.

The only good lead I get out of my research was that Dr. Sanford Ellicott had a son, Dr. James Ellicott, a local psychiatrist. I could fake mental health problems for an afternoon.

James Ellicott doesn’t have an opening until tomorrow morning. I wander aimlessly around the city, looking for something to occupy my time and my mind, all the while trying to convince myself at all costs that there is no need to go back to the Asylum and search the offices for records that would probably get me farther ahead in the game than visiting Dr. Ellicott would.

I get a call from Sam late that night, most likely after Dean had gone to sleep. He tells me that there is a poltergeist in their old house, and they found a psychic that knew their dad, a woman I actually met a long time ago. A southern, homely bad-ass black woman, Missouri Moseley. She’s the reason my dad and John Winchester know each other. She was the one who introduced John to the supernatural world, opened his eyes to all the things that are out there in the dark, but my dad was the one who taught John how to hunt them.

There’s no sign of their dad, which is no surprise. I still hold back the information that John is the one who gave me the coordinates to Illinois when Sam asks what I’m doing. He laughs at me though, because even when I’m brokenhearted I still can’t stay away from the job. Then, in a hushed voice, Sam says that Dean broke down and called John for help, and when he came back from the phone call, his eyes were red, like he’d been crying. He can’t remember the last time he saw Dean cry. I try to build up a wall around my mind and heart at Sam’s next words: “He needs you, Harley.” I say goodbye and end the call. Dean’s strong. He can handle things without me.

The next morning I mentally prepare myself for my psychiatrist appointment while in the shower. I have a bit of fun as I come up with problems I could talk about. I end up frightening myself at how many of those problems actually stem from the truth, though.

It’s chilly outside, so I pull on a leather jacket over my long sleeve shirt. I wish I had the sense to own perfume because the jacket smells like Dean’s aftershave and I would really like something to cover it up. It must have been stuck with his jacket or something back in the Impala. I consider taking it off, but the scent is comforting, almost like he’s here with me.

Great. Do I miss him?

I get into the old beater from the junkyard and drive to Dr. Ellicott’s office. The building is on the second floor of a small plaza with red brick walls that remind me of the Asylum. The doctor must want to stick with his roots. I take a seat on a couch in the waiting room next to a potted plant and wait my turn. My eyes scan over a tasteful, modern plaque on the wall next to the door across the room, labeling Dr. James Ellicott in Clinical Psychiatry.

After about a half an hour, an older man, maybe in his fifties but not showing a single gray hair, opens his office door to release his previous patient. The doctor wears a white lab coat over a worn out navy sweater vest and slacks.

“Harley Cooper?” he calls.

“That’s me,” I say, rising to my feet.

“Come on in,” Dr. Ellicott says cheerily.

I step into the shrink’s office. Typical set up. Large oak desk faced by two large high-backed armchairs, a wide back wall of windows spotted with the morning rain, and a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf filled with books on the psyche. I have to admit, I was half expecting machinery similar to the ones I found in the South Wing, or at least one of those long sofas where I’d lay and spill out my misery. The maroon carpet is plush and absorbs my feet with every step I take to a chair that Dr. Ellicott offers me. I sit and note the nameplate on the desk, matching the plaque on the wall outside.

“Dr. Ellicott…that name...wasn’t there a Dr. Sanford Ellicott?” I ask, completely abandoning my mental patient ruse. “He was a Chief Psychiatrist somewhere?”

Dr. Ellicott takes a seat behind the desk and glances at a framed photo on the wall to my right. It’s an old photograph, an all business head-and-shoulders shot of a man who must be Sanford Ellicott.

“My father was Chief of Staff at the old Roosevelt Asylum,” Dr. Ellicott tells me simply. “How’d you know?”

I raise my eyebrows. Smile. “I’m kind of a local history buff.” A local history buff that knows next-to-nothing about the local history. “Wasn’t there…some kind of incident or something? In the hospital…the South Wing, I think?”

The doctor shifts in his chair and gives me a polite smile. “We’re on your dollar, Harley. We’re here to talk about you.”

Right, then. Wrong approach. “Oh, yeah. Okay.”

“So…how’s things?” he asks after a moment.

“Good,” I answer.

Dr. Ellicott stares at me. “What’s been going on?” he prompts me.

Where do I begin? I think about it, before I remember I’m really here to get information on the Asylum. I figure I could start with something believable. “My dad died a few years ago. And I was on a road trip with my friends.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your father. How was your road trip? Was that fun?”

“Loads,” I say distractedly, my eyes wandering over the spines of the books. “You know, met lots of interesting people, did lots of interesting things.” My head shoots back to the doctor. “Now…what exactly did happen in the South Wing? I forget…”

I receive another smile, this one more gentle. He probably thinks I’m just avoiding personal conversation at this point. “Look, if you’re a local history buff, you know all about the Roosevelt riot.”

My eyes widen at this new information and I scramble to keep my cover. “The riot? No, I know, I’m just curious–”

“Let’s cut the bull, shall we?” Dr. Ellicott says, leaning forward on his elbows. “You’re avoiding the subject.”

“What subject?” I ask innocuously.

“You.” He sits back in his chair. Observes me for a moment. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll tell you all about Roosevelt Asylum…if you tell me one honest thing about yourself.”

I stare at him blankly, stuck again on the _Where do I begin?_

“Like…losing your father. How do you feel about that?”

How do you feel about that? That’s just How Does That Make You Feel’s sister. Six words that make weak people cringe and angry people want to bust through a wall. I’m somewhere in between right now. How do I feel about my father’s death? I don’t really know. I never gave myself a chance to think about it. So much happened since that day, I just kept shoving it to the side until the hurt became a faded memory. Why didn’t I just bring up my feelings about Dean? They’re more fresh, it wouldn’t be as hard to dig up.

“Well,” I say slowly, telling myself that it’s okay, I’m doing this for the case. “I guess I miss him. But at least I got to say goodbye.”

Dr. Ellicott nods. This is going to be a long hour.

In the end, it was worth it. I told Dr. Ellicott a little bit about my relationship with my dad, carefully spun a relatively similar story about the situation with my brother and mom, and he ended up helping me feel a little bit better about myself. If only we could have touched upon the subject of Dean. In return, I got information about the Asylum.

The South Wing was where they housed the real hard cases. The psychotics, the criminally insane. One night in 1964, the patients rioted. They attacked the staff, each other, and eventually ended up taking over the Asylum. There were casualties on both sides, and the way Dr. Ellicott tells it, some of it was pretty gory. Some of the bodies were never found, including Chief of Staff Ellicott. Cops scoured every inch of the place, but the patients must have stuffed the bodies somewhere hidden. After the riot, the surviving patients were transferred to another mental facility and the Roosevelt Asylum was shut down for good.

I sit in the car, the key dangling in the silent ignition, mulling the information over. I was hungry for breakfast before my appointment but now food is the farthest thing from my mind. All of those violent deaths, unrecovered bodies. Roosevelt Asylum must be swarming with angry spirits. That means another trip back there for me. I knew it wasn’t inevitable, but knowing how it all happened, well, that just makes it worse.

If I’m going back to the Asylum tonight I’ll need to pick up a few things. I’ve got a heavy duty flashlight that will work just fine, but I didn’t think to bring salt and a night vision video camera with me. I jot down a quick shopping list on the back of a fast food receipt I find wedged between the seats and get to work.

I wait for the cover of night to make my entrance back into the Roosevelt Asylum. At the doors of the South Wing I stop and set my duffel bag on the floor. I take out three things: the EMF detector, the flashlight, the video camera, and turn them all on. I sling the duffel over my shoulder like a messenger bag as I get to my feet, tuck the EMF in a fold of fabric in the bag so it can be hands-free while I handle the light and camera. I flip the camera to night vision, hold the flashlight at my side, and enter the Wing.

The first hallway is clear. The second hallway rewards me with an intense warbling from the EMF meter and dozens of tiny light spots drifting like fireflies on the camera screen. Light spots that are invisible to the naked eye. I trek on carefully. There’s most likely multiple spirits out and about, and the only thing that could make me more nervous than a pissed-off spirit at this point is the pissed-off spirit of a psycho killer.

As if the ghosts of the Asylum could read my thoughts, I hear a rustling from behind me. I spin around, aiming my flashlight and camera down the hall. It’s empty. I continue on, cautious and wary, my ears pricked up for any little noise or movement. Right about now is when I wish Sam or Dean was with me. I could really use a partner for backup.

I turn a corner and my light catches on a rusted metal sink set into the wall in the next room. In the dimness I can just make out a dark shadow below it. With the EMF warbling like mad, I creep closer, my light growing larger, brighter, illuminating a figure crammed sideways underneath the sink whose head shakes in a jerky, otherworldly fashion, as if in a silent seizure. Just as the shaking ends and I make out the twisted, mangled face of a young woman, the apparition vanishes. The EMF warbling promptly stops and resumes its quiet, methodical beeping.

Only then do I realize I’ve entered the Ellicott Ward. It’s silent, eerie, except for the beeping coming from the EMF and my breathing that I can’t seem to quiet no matter how hard I try. I aim the video camera around the room. The orbs that were in the hall aren’t in the ward. On my second scan of the room, the green-black tint of the camera is disturbed by a lighter green figure, accompanying the insane warbling of the EMF. I adjust the zoom and gasp, retreating as the lens focuses on an ancient, wrinkled old woman in a filthy, tattered hospital gown. She has long, ratty hair and blood seeping from lobotomy scars, and she slowly advances on me.

I involuntarily stumble back from her. At my action, she rushes at me, her movements jerky and sporadic, like the figure under the sink. I back myself into a wall, then look up and find that the spirit materialized to where I can see her without night vision. I watch her as she draws closer, her entire body convulsing. She opens her mouth but no sound comes out.

The flashlight falls from my hand in the same movement I slip the cord of the video camera around my wrist. My only focus right now is getting the salt gun out of the duffel. In my rush to unzip the bag, I forget the EMF detector tucked in the folds and I send it crashing to the floor. It breaks upon impact on the tile, silencing the warble. I roll my eyes. Dean’s old homemade EMF would have held up better than that expensive one.

Just then, the spirit shoves her face in mine. Her mouth is still twisted into what I realize is a silent scream. My heart races with fear and adrenaline, but a small part of me is also curious. Why hasn’t she tried to hurt me? She’s surely had enough time. My fist closes around the sawed-off in the bag. I whip it out, aim it at the spirit’s chest, and pull the trigger. The gun goes off and the spirit vanishes into wisps of smoke.

I let out a long sigh. Without wasting another moment I hightail it out of the Ellicott Ward. I no longer have my EMF reader to guide me, so I open the video camera again and hold it up along with the flashlight.

I’m deeper into the Asylum now than I had gone the other day. Every step is careful, calculated, as if the floor were littered with invisible land mines. I need not be so vigilant, though, since all is quiet. Until the squeak of furniture dragged across the floor makes me jump and raises the little hairs on the back of my neck. I wave the camera and flashlight around until the beams illuminate a medical cart down the hall, rusted and decrepit. There’s something behind it, a figure obscured by the equipment and supplies stacked on the cart. Without the EMF reader I can’t tell if it’s a spirit or not, because the night vision will pick up things both living and non. There’s only one thing to do.

I stow the camera carefully in the bag and replace it with the gun. Flashlight raised, I creep forward. Both spirits and humans can see when I approach, as the beam gets larger, and if it was a human I’m sure they would have shown themselves by now. So I ready the gun and yank the cart aside. All the supplies piled on top crash to the floor, the noise echoing loudly in the empty hall, and the figure screams. I scream too, instinctively, and aim the gun at the scrambling figure.

“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” the girl squeals. She throws her hands over her head protectively.

I immediately lower the gun from her face and replace it with the flashlight. It’s just a teenager. A terrified one, who has no doubt been seeing ghouls all night.

“Uh, it’s all right." My breathing is hard and I'm slightly embarrassed from screaming like a little girl so I don’t sound too reassuring. I clear my throat and offer my hand to help her up. “I’m not going to hurt you. It’s okay.” I get a good look at her. She’s got dirt under her fingernails and smeared along one cheek, and her blonde hair is knotted. My heart wants to go out to her, but at the same time I think, there were 'NO TRESPASSING' signs outside. Can’t you read? “What’s your name?”

“Katherine,” she says. “Kat.”

“I’m Harley. What are you doing here?”

“I was with my boyfriend…Gavin…”

“Is he here?”

“Somewhere.” She looks at me sheepishly. “He thought it would be funny to…try and see some ghosts.” Her face grows troubled. “I thought it was all just, you know. Pretend. But…I’ve seen things. I heard Gavin scream.”

“Listen, Kat. I’m gonna get you out of here, then I’m going to find your boyfriend, okay?”

Kat’s eyes scan my face, and all trace of worry is replaced by determination. “No. I’m not going to leave without Gavin. I’m coming with you.”

I scoff. “Look, it’s no joke around here.” I bite my tongue to keep myself from pointing out how she was just cowering behind a medicine cart. “It’s dangerous.”

“That’s why I’ve got to find him,” she says with resolve.

I sigh. She’s stubborn. There’s no way I’ll get her to wait outside while I go searching the nuthouse for her stupid boyfriend. And I’m not really in a position to turn down backup. “All right, let’s go. Stay close.”

We continue down the path I was on before, even though my previous quest has been temporarily thwarted by the hunt for Gavin. I fish a smaller flashlight out of my duffel bag and give it to Kat to use. We shine the lights into each room we pass, calling out Gavin’s name but neither of us daring to speak higher than normal talking voices. There’s something about the Asylum that gives off the feeling that just yelling will send the spirits gunning for you.

“I got a question for you,” I tell Kat after a brief moment of silence. “You’ve seen a lot of horror movies?”

Kat shrugs. “I guess so.”

“Do me a favor,” I say with my head inside a room. “Next time you see one, pay attention.” After clearing the room, I face Kat. “When someone says the place is haunted…don’t go in.”

Kat’s face turns red and she walks on. “Gavin,” she calls out. “Gavin, it’s me…”

The next turn brings us to a dead-end windowless corridor. At the very end is a tiled room where the floor slants to the middle, the center tiles connected by a drain. Four old-fashioned tubs with water rings inside line the walls. It’s a Tub Room, for hydrotherapy. Sprawled on the floor between the two tubs on the right, unconscious, is a teenage boy.

“Gavin!” Kat cries. She runs over to him and shakes him gently. I follow and shine my light on them. A thin trickle of blood runs from his forehead, under his dark hair, onto the old tile.

Gavin gasps awake and scuttles back from Kat. He squints in the darkness. “Kat!” He then crawls forward and wraps his arms awkwardly around her. “Are you okay?”

“Yes. I was worried about you,” Kat says. “How about you? Are you all right?” She gingerly touches the blood on Gavin’s forehead. It’s wet, but the bleeding seems to have stopped. Still, he winces.

“I was running. I think I fell.”

“What were you running from?” I ask.

Gavin looks up, taken aback. He must not have seen me earlier, even though I’m holding the only source of light in the room.

“Who are you?” he asks.

“I’m Harley,” I say impatiently. “What were you running from?”

“There was this girl,” he says, his eyes crinkling in the effort of remembering. “Her face, it was…all messed up.”

“Did she try to hurt you?”

“What?” he says, as if it’s odd I would ask, then stops as he thinks it over. “Well, no. She…”

“She what?” I prompt him.

Gavin glances at Kat. He looks sickened, and slightly embarrassed. “She…she kissed me.”

I raise my eyebrow, and have to give Kat some credit for not getting upset. Then again, it’s got to be hard to get upset at your boyfriend kissing a dead girl. “But…she didn’t hurt you. Physically.”

“Dude. She kissed me.” Gavin shudders. “I’m scarred for life.” Kat puts her hand on his shoulder comfortingly.

“Trust me, it could have been worse,” I say. “Is there anything else you remember?”

“Actually, she tried to whisper something in my ear.”

“What?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I ran like hell.”

I nod. Gavin and Kat embrace again. I turn away when they kiss. I reward myself for not thinking about Dean when I see them and then revoke that reward for thinking about Dean when thinking about not thinking about him. I walk back out into the hall to assess my situation. Saved a girl, check. Found her missing boyfriend, check. Figured out why a bunch of people are dying and going crazy after visiting an insane asylum when all the spirits encountered tonight have been the farthest thing from malevolent? Negative.

Gavin and Kat emerge from the Tub Room and we head to the main lobby. First things first, I need to get them out of here before I continue on my original search. Part of me wants to call it quits for the night because I feel like I’m getting nowhere and that I’m missing an important piece of the puzzle. But I know the Asylum itself is the biggest piece.

We enter the Ellicott Ward. Just beyond this is a couple of hallways, then the less unnerving lobby, then glorious freedom. We come across the sink where I saw the first spirit. I shine the flashlight at it for good measure, even though I know the spirit must be long gone. The beam flickers. I whack it against my palm a few times, because that usually helps, only this time it doesn’t. I glance back at Kat. Her small flashlight flickers as well. Our eyes meet just as both lights go out, plunging us into darkness.

“Oh, man,” Gavin says, his voice shaky.

“I’ve got a lighter.” I put the flashlight in my duffel and dig around for it. “I think…”

“Ow, Gavin, you’re hurting my arm,” Kat says. “I didn’t know you were so scared of the dark.”

“What?” Gavin says, startling me. His voice is beside me. Kat’s voice came from farther away. “What are you talking about?”

“Um…” Kat mumbles uncertainly.

“Ah ha!” I raise the lighter and flick the flint wheel a few times until the spark ignites. The tiny flame doesn’t offer much in terms of light, but it’s enough to bring a ghostly, deformed figure into view. And that figure has a death grip on Kat’s arm.

“Kat! Look out!” Gavin shouts uselessly.

The spirit wrenches Kat through an open doorway. Gavin and I both yell out and lunge forward, only to have a heavy metal door swing shut in our faces. From the other side, Kat screams.

I claw at the handle while Gavin pounds on the door, yelling Kat’s name. It’s no use. The door is too heavy and it’s shut tight by a ghost.

“Stop, Gavin, stop,” I say, holding him back. “Let’s be smart about this.” I silently thank myself that I added a crowbar to my list last-minute. Although it’s intended use was to ward off ghosts with the wrought iron, busting through a door will work, too. “Kat, hold on!”

“Let me out! Please!” she cries desperately, her voice muffled. “Hurry!”

I pry at the door with the crowbar, shoving it again at again at different areas, looking for a weak spot. It doesn’t do any good.

“Let me try,” Gavin says, making a grab for the crowbar. I yank it away.

“No, it’s not going to let us in.” To make the situation more melodramatic, Kat screams again.

“Give it to me!” Gavin yells. He shoves me hard into the metal door. My spine catches in the edge of the door jamb. I grunt out in pain and drop the crowbar. Gavin picks it up and swings it at the door like he’s trying to hack down a tree.

I rub my neck and take a deep breath, preparing to scream at Gavin with everything I’ve got in me. Because right now I have a job to do and all these idiots are doing is making it ten times harder to get them out of here alive.

“GAVIN! STOP IT!” I shriek so loud my voice catches. Gavin stops short and stares at me. “Just cut it out, will you? I don’t think these spirits are dangerous, and beating on the door isn’t going to help.”

“Aren’t dangerous?” Gavin repeats dubiously. “Are you insane?”

“Look where we’re at,” I say, gesturing to the Asylum. Gavin’s eyes widen, and I take this moment of silence to turn back to the door. “Kat! Kat, listen to me! It’s not going to hurt you!”

Something slams against the door. I have a feeling Kat flung herself at it. “Get me out of here!” she pleads.

“You have to calm down!” I order. “You have to face it!”

“She’s got to what?” Gavin says.

“I’ve got to what?” Kat squeals at the same time.

“These spirits aren’t trying to hurt us. I think they’re trying to communicate.” Gavin stares at me like I spoke Mandarin. “You have to face it. Listen to it.”

“You face it!” Kat yells.

“It’s the only way you’re going to get out of there.”

“No!” Kat cries.

I close my eyes. I don’t have time to count backwards from ten so I make do with a quick, relaxing deep breath to calm myself. At least I’m not scared anymore. I try to sound encouraging. “Just look at it, that’s all. It’s not going to hurt you. It would have done so by now if it wanted to. Come on, you can do it.”

Silence. Gavin and I stand there with bated breath, waiting as the seconds tick by like hours.

“Kat?” Gavin says tentatively. His voice is so quiet I doubt she could hear him. He turns to me. “I hope you’re right about this.”

“Me, too,” I whisper. Gavin shoots me a murderous look. “What choice did I have? The crowbar wasn’t working and so far between the three of us tonight, we’ve seen four spirits and none of them have tried to hurt us.”

The metal door creaks open on its own. Kat emerges, unscathed but definitely scared out of her mind. She rushes into Gavin’s arms. I poke my head into the room and find that the spirit is gone.

Gavin holds her shoulders so he can look her over. “Kat?”

“One-three-seven,” she mumbles. “It whispered in my ear. One-three-seven.”

“It must be a room number,” I say.

Gavin continues to gently console Kat, but I’m not even disgusted this time. The wheels are turning.

“If these spirits aren’t trying to hurt anyone, maybe this is what they’ve been trying to tell us,” I muse aloud.

“What are you talking about?” Gavin asks.

“You’ve heard the stories, right?” I say, more for my benefit than theirs. I need someone to bounce ideas off of. “There must have been some malicious spirits in the Asylum causing all of those incidents. But this is the fifth spirit we’ve come across that hasn’t been evil. They must know something and want someone to figure it out.”

I get blank stares from both teens. I sigh. “I take it now you guys are ready to leave?”

“That’s an understatement,” Kat says.

“All right. Let’s get you guys out of here.” I walk the way we were headed before we were interrupted by our ghouly friend.

“You’re not leaving?” Kat asks me.

“No, I need to go see what’s in that room. That’s what I came here for in the first place, before I found you.”

“So…how do you know about all this ghost stuff?” she asks.

“It’s kind of my job,” I say.

“Why would anyone want a job like that?” Gavin asks.

“I had a crappy guidance counselor,” I say dryly.

“And you work alone?” Kat asks.

I stare down the empty corridor, but I see Sam and Dean’s faces float before my eyes. “Right now I do,” I say after a long moment.

The entrance to the South Wing looms nearer with every step, and relief blooms inside me. Just beyond the closed doors is the lobby, then that sweet freedom I was thinking of earlier. Maybe being outside for a few minutes breathing fresh air will be enough to clear my head before I go back inside for round two.

I tilt my head to the side. Closed doors? I didn’t close the doors when I came in. I would never be that stupid. I rush forward and pull on the doorknobs, but it won’t open. Held closed by the same unnatural force that kept Kat locked in the room.

Or maybe not. Why are the spirits that weren’t harming us suddenly keeping us from leaving? This could be the work of the other spirits, the vile ones that murder people.

“We have a small problem,” I say, turning ruefully to Gavin and Kat.

Gavin’s eyes flit between me and the door a few times before he starts to pound on it. When brute force doesn’t make it budge, he gives it a swift kick and turns to Kat and I. “Let’s break it down.”

“Yeah, because that worked out so well last time,” I say cynically.

“Then…a window,” Gavin suggests.

Kat looks up at the windows that line the corridor. “They’re barred.”

Gavin folds his arms over his chest. “Well, how are we supposed to get out?”

“That’s the point,” I tell him. “We’re not. There’s something in here that doesn’t want us to leave.”

“What, those patients?” Kat asks.

“No…something else. The malevolent spirits I mentioned before.” I look around the hall. Each time I came in here I took a right at the first fork. Maybe I’ll try going left, see where that leads me. “You guys wait here.” I turn to leave, and out of the corner of my eye I see them step together, holding each other for protection in the darkness. I can’t leave them with no means of defending themselves. “Can either of you handle a shotgun?”

“What?” Gavin scoffs. “No.”

“I can,” Kat says, surprising both Gavin and me. She just shrugs. “My dad took me skeet shooting a few times.”

I nod once and hand her the sawed-off I almost shot her with not long ago. And, because I’m always prepared, I produce another one for myself and leave the basically useless duffel at their feet.

“It’s loaded with rock salt,” I tell them. “It might not kill a spirit, but it will repel it. If something comes at you…shoot.”

“Okay,” Kat says, and I feel somewhat satisfied. I turn away and head off into the darkness, now comfortable leaving the two teenagers on their own.

The night reaches its peak. In just a few hours it will be dawn and I will be out of time. I have to hurry as I search for an exit. I jog through the halls, only to find dead-end after dead-end. I know there’s got to be another exit through the South Wing somewhere, but I can’t find it. Frustrated, I give up and return to Kat and Gavin.

“I checked everywhere,” I tell them when I get back to the closed-off doors. “There’s no other way out.”

“So what the hell are we gonna do?” Gavin snaps at me, as if it were my fault he decided to come to the Asylum in the first place.

“For starters, we’re not going to panic,” I say.

“Why the hell not?”

His stupid question doesn’t warrant a response. I glance out of the nearest window. The sky outside is a few shades lighter than the darkest of night. My watch says it’s just after two in the morning. If I can’t get these kids out of here, then I need to continue with what I came here to do. “Will you guys be all right here? I need to go check out that room. See if I can find out what we’re dealing with.”

“Can’t we come with you?” Kat asks.

“I want to say yes, but the quicker I get this done, the faster we can get out of here. Watch yourselves, okay?”

They nod. This time, I feel a little worse about leaving them. But I have a job to do. I head down the hall with my flashlight and shotgun. Just after I turn the corner, I hear Kat say, “Hey, Gavin? If we make it out of here alive…we are so breaking up.”

It’s hard to decipher the faded room numbers on top of the doors even with the newly usable flashlight. Eventually, I find what I’m looking for. Wedged between two patient rooms is 137, a moldy, ransacked office. The windowless room has an overturned desk and a few rusted file cabinets. I step inside, shine the light around, and spot a brass nameplate amidst the junk and papers strewn across the floor. I pick it up and read the name: Dr. Sanford Ellicott. Why am I not surprised.

I rake the light over the floor, over large linoleum tiles. At first, I don’t notice anything out of the ordinary. Then, a particular tile catches in the dim light. This one is different from the others, set off by a warped center and buckling edges. I crouch down by it and pull at the tile. It lifts up easily, as I’m sure it’s done many times before, revealing a hole in the floor and exposing the pipes beneath. Wedged between the pipes is an old, leather-bound book.

“This is why I get paid the big bucks,” I say to no one. I take out the book and sit cross-legged on the floor. The book is large and the pages are yellowed, but I can still read the scribbled cursive on the first page: _Patient’s Log_.

Slowly I flip through the brittle pages of cluttered, dense writing and sketches. Sort of like Leonardo Da Vinci meets Hannibal Lecter. There’s detailed pen drawings of human brain vivisections, barbaric looking surgical instruments. Lobotomy tools. Clamps and vises. These drawings make the equipment in the Ellicott Ward look like a child’s tea set.

“I guess all work and no play makes Dr. Ellicott a very dull boy,” I mutter.

Just like earlier in the night, the little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. My head shoots up and I lift the flashlight, looking around for the source of my paranoia. With no night vision camera or EMF detector, I can’t tell if anything is around. With just my eyes, I see that I’m still alone. I shake my head and continue to browse through the book.

Dr. Feel-Good was working on some sort of extreme rage therapy. It looks like he thought if his patients could vent their anger, they’d be cured of it. But instead of helping them vent, he was just making them worse, making them angrier. What if the malevolent spirit in the Asylum is Dr. Ellicott’s spirit, doing the same things to the cop, those kids in the seventies? Making them so angry they become homicidal? If that’s the case, I need to somehow find his bones and torch them.

The patients must have been rioting against him, against these experiments. So if Dr. Ellicott was performing experiments on the patients with instruments like the ones in the drawings, that means he had somewhere to do them. There wasn’t anything in the Ellicott Ward resembling anything close to these gruesome tools, which means there must be another room somewhere hidden. Somewhere he could execute his experiments away from the watchful eye of the Asylum. And it’s not here in room 137, or in the old Ward. I flip back to the first pages and find mention of a secret procedure room where he’d work on his patients. I should get back to Kat and Gavin. Let them know I’ll be searching for another room in the Asylum.

“That was fast,” Kay says when I arrive.

“What do you mean? I was gone for almost forty-five minutes.”

Gavin looks puzzled. “No, you were just here a few minutes ago. You said you were going to check out the basement.”

“The basement?” I repeat. That must be where the procedure room is. But it’s almost too convenient. “This must be a trap.”

My phone rings. I take it out of my pocket and my stomach lurches. It’s Dean. This really isn’t the time. It’s three in the morning. He’s probably drunk and depressed, and I’m locked up in an insane asylum. But it’s Dean, and I can’t ignore him.

“Hello?” I say into the phone.

“Hey, Harley!” Dean says, and he sounds absolutely sober.

“Dean?” I say quizzically.

“I’m here in the Asylum. Sam told me where you were. I’ve heard about that place. I can’t believe you went there alone.”

“Wait, you’re here?” I say skeptically. “Where are you?”

“In the basement,” Dean says. “Get down here, quick. This place is a freak show.”

“Um, sure.” I hang up the phone. I look at Kat and Gavin. “The hell is going on here?”

“Who was that?” Gavin asks.

“An old friend,” I say, staring at the phone peculiarly. “Said he came to help me. That he’s in the basement.”

“No one came in here,” Kat says, looking at the doors. “Believe me, if these things opened, we’d be gone.”

“No, I know,” I say. “This thing is luring me to the basement. I need to go there.”

“So you’re just going to walk _into_ the trap?” Gavin says.

“I have to. It’s the only way I can finish this once and for all.” Kat and Gavin exchange worried looks. “I’ll be fine. Just stay here.”

I grab the duffel bag and take off down the hall for the third time tonight. I have no idea where the basement is, but I have a feeling it’s back by the Tub Room. That’s the only place I didn’t check when I was looking for an exit because I knew it was a dead-end. And I’m right. The door across from the Tub Room leads down a rickety staircase with wood that looks like Swiss cheese. I take a deep breath. This is it.

At the bottom of the stairs is a tiny room with three doors. All of them are shut except for one. I hold the shotgun steady in front of me and step forward, pushing the door aside with the barrel of the gun. There’s nothing particularly interesting about this room. Just another abandoned, ruined chamber. I’m about to turn to go when the flashlight goes out. Not even a flicker to show an attempt at life. It’s dead.

From behind me, a long, dragged out creak echoes eerily through the room. Just visible in the faint light coming from above the stairs, the far wall gives way and swings slowly backward. I roll my eyes. So dramatic. But I’ve got no choice but to go in there. I double check the shotgun before moving forward into the dark, secret doorway.

I enter a long room, divided into a veritable maze with greasy, translucent surgical curtains hanging from the ceiling. I poke around, carefully, cautiously. But there’s only silence. Stillness. Darkness.

“Hello?” I call out, feeling like those morons in horror movies that shout out for the killer. But I did call out, so I deserve whatever comes to me.

A shadow crosses the room behind the curtains, blurred and indistinct. I gasp and turn to the shadow, but there’s nothing there. I approach the curtains slowly, shotgun at the ready, and then reach out with an unsteady hand and whip the curtains aside. There’s no shadow. Just a filthy cot with barbaric looking leather straps.

Hmm. I face the room again, only to turn directly into Dr. Ellicott. The elder, that is. I recognize him from the picture in his son’s office. He wears a blood spattered doctor’s smock, he’s missing one eye, his gray hair is frayed and sticking out all over the place. He lunges forward, arms out, and grips the sides of my head. I cry out in pain. Electric shocks course through my skull, originating from Dr. Ellicott’s palms.

In a gentle, sonorous voice, Dr. Ellicott says, “Don’t be afraid. I’m going to help you. I’m going to make you _all_ better.”

A little boy’s face looms in front of me. He can’t be more than a year old. Big brown eyes. Sandy blond hair growing in soft tufts on his head. A bright, wide smile showing tiny white stumps protruding from baby gums. A happy child, sitting against a soft yellow wall with baby toys scattered around him.

I see a gun. A Mossberg 500 hunting rifle, sitting shiny and clean on the kitchen table. My hand reaches out for it, because I just have to touch it, I just have to hold the beautiful weapon.

Then, the doorbell rings, making me jump. I snatch my hand back and look up at a tall, handsome man who scolds me.

“Don’t you touch that gun, Lee,” my father says sternly, pointing an accusatory finger at me. “Be patient. We’ll go outside and shoot some cans in a few minutes.” He leaves the room to answer the door.

But the gun has my attention. I’ve never held something so large. My dad let me shoot some handguns before, but nothing this powerful.

I hear voices in the hall. I know I have a few minutes. I just want to see how it feels in my hands. Logan laughs in the corner, drool spilling out of his mouth as he gnaws on a teething ring. I reach out and carefully pick up the gun, the barrel in one hand and the butt in the other. It’s so beautiful. Long, too. It’s almost as big as I am. I rest the rifle butt in the crook of my arm, grip the slide like I’ve seen my dad do a hundred times. I cock it, point the gun around the room. So this is what being a hunter feels like.

“Harley!” my dad shouts, his voice booming through the kitchen. My whole body shakes with fear and I drop the gun, which catches on the side of the table and lands barrel-out on the floor. The _bang_ of the shotgun going off hurts my ears and I duck under the table for cover, my hands over my head.

My dad screams. It’s a horrendous sound. Yelling and sobbing and cursing all at once. I peek out from under my hands and see my dad kneeling by the wall, red stuff smeared all over it. Small baby feet stick out from behind my dad’s large body. When my mom comes running into the room, my dad shifts to look up at her helplessly, and that’s when I see it. The baby feet. The tiny legs in the brand new blue jeans. The green t-shirt I picked out for Logan at the store now soaked in blood and chunks of pink goo. And then nothing. That’s all that’s left of my baby brother.

The scene changes. The vision of Sam and Dean facing off replaces the blood and gore of my brother’s death. Dean has his hands up in defense; Sam points a sawed-off at him. A thin line of blood trickles from his nose. He reaches up to wipe it away.

“Sam…put the gun down,” Dean says calmly. He doesn’t move, doesn’t do anything to set Sam off.

“Is that an order?” Sam spits.

Dean thinks for a moment. “Call it a friendly request.”

“’Cause I’m getting pretty tired of taking your orders.”

“Just…calm down, okay?”

Sam rolls his eyes. “For once in your life, just shut your mouth,” he says through gritted teeth. He raises the gun a little higher.

“What are you gonna do, Sam? The gun’s loaded with rock salt. It’s not gonna kill me.”

“No,” Sam agrees. Then, with a maniacal grin spread across his face, he adds, “But it will hurt like hell.”

_No!_ I scream, but I’m trapped in my thoughts, tied down by a heavy force that prevents me from leaping out to block Dean as Sam fires the gun, nailing Dean square in the chest. Dean ratchets back and lands sprawled out on his back, groaning in pain.

Please don’t fight anymore, I beg. Please. If Sam and Dean aren’t here with me in the Asylum, they must still be in Kansas. This must be what they’re doing right now. Falling victim to the poltergeist. But that doesn’t make sense. Poltergeists don’t possess people. They wreak havoc on your life. Like what Dr. Ellicott does to the trespassers of Roosevelt Asylum.

“I mean, why are we still here, Dean?” Sam continues. “Because you’re following Dad’s orders like a good little soldier? ’Cause you always do what he says without question? You that desperate for his approval?”

That doesn’t make sense. Sam is the one who made them go to Kansas, not John. What is he talking about? Sam walks over to Dean, each step he takes clears up the foggy scenery around him. By the time he looms over his brother’s body, I can make out the surgical curtains and the moldy tile floor of the secret room in the Asylum.

My heart skips a few beats. Was Dean telling the truth? Did they really come to the Asylum to help me?

“See, that’s the difference between you and me,” Sam says. He taps the barrel of the gun against his temple. “I actually have a mind of my own. I’m not pathetic.”

“So what, you’re gonna kill me?” Dean needles him.

Sam chuckles incredulously. “I’m sick if you telling me what to do. I mean, we’re no closer to finding Dad today than we were four months ago!”

“Then here,” Dean says, reaching to the back of his pants. “Let me make it easy for you.” He produces a pistol from his waistband and holds it out to Sam. “Take it. Bullets work a helluva lot better than rock salt.”

I scream my head off now, struggling against invisible binds, trying to break free so I can stop the madness. What the hell is this, Murder Your Brother Hour? I kick and yell and bite at nothing, but I’m stuck.

Sam sets his shotgun down on the floor and kicks it to the side. Replaces it with the pistol. Points it at Dean’s head. Dean shakes his head solemnly.

“You really hate me that much? You think you can kill your own brother?” Dean looks right at Sam, keeping his eyes locked on his. “Then go ahead. Pull the trigger. Do it.”

_No, Sam!_ I cry out. Don’t you dare shoot that gun! Tears of anger and frustration and impending doom spill out of my eyes, roll down my cheeks into my mouth. I taste the salt.

At least Sam looks like he struggles with the idea of whether he wants to kill Dean or not. The inner struggle doesn’t last long, though, because I see his finger squeeze the trigger. I close my eyes, bracing for the shot, but it doesn’t come.

Sam looks down, confused. He pulls the trigger over and over. I’ve never heard a more glorious sound than those tiny little clicks signaling an empty chamber.

In Sam’s moment of bewilderment, Dean sweeps his legs out, knocking Sam to the floor. Sam grunts as all the air leaves his lungs. Dean leaps over to Sam and delivers a hard punch to his face, knocking him unconscious.

Regret fills his voice as he looks down at his little brother. “Sorry, Sammy. But I’m not handing you a loaded pistol.”

The image dissolves in a black swirl and reforms into a bathroom. Contemporary and expensive. Bright sunlight spills through the window. An empty pill bottle lies on its side by the bathtub, next to the cap. A couple of white pills dot the black checkered tile, and I don’t have to wonder where the rest are for very long when a red drop of liquid falls on one of the pills. I look up, see a long, slender hand hanging over the rim of the tub. Blood dripping from the wrist.

Submerged in a bath of crimson water is my mother. My once lovely mother with hair like the sun and eyes the color of the sky. I always envied her eyes. Now they are pale and empty and lifeless.

A meadow replaces that horrible scene, and I’m thankful for it. I can’t stand to have that image in my head, even though it isn’t real. I never actually saw my mother dead. My dad was the one who found her, hid the body from me until the police came. One death must have been enough for me at seven years old. What changed when he decided to make me a hunter?

“Harley,” Dean says softly. He’s too far away for me to see him clearly, but his voice comes in right next to my ear. Seeing him in the meadow, among the colorful flowers and huge green trees calms me. He looks happy as he walks forward, arms outstretched. I try to reach out to him but my arms are pinned to my side. This doesn’t worry me though. Should it? I don’t know. I’m too relaxed to care.

“Harley,” Dean says again, soothingly. I close my eyes and smile, smell the sweet aroma of the meadow, hear the babbling of the invisible stream somewhere in the distance. When I open my eyes again, Dean materializes in front of my face, and a scream catches in my throat.

His face is cut and bloody. A bruise forms on the left side of his jaw. His red shirt is torn and missing a few buttons. Along his right forearm, just under the roll of his sleeve, is a mark. A mark like a scar, but one I’ve never seen before. His fist clutches an ancient, toothed blade. But that’s not the most disturbing thing about him, my beautiful Dean who now radiates evil.

Dean’s eyes are completely black. Darker than the night.

Every bit of leisure I felt moments ago seeps away as I stare at this seething, demonic version of the man I love. He grips the blade tight, holds the sharp tip to my neck.

“You’re going to die here, Harley,” he says with a snarl. “You’re going to die and no one is ever going to know what happened to you.”

“No,” I manage to say, turning my head back and forth, trying to retreat from the blade.

“Did you think I would come to your rescue? You left me. I would never come looking for you.” The knife digs into my skin. I feel the blood run and the pain intensify.

“Stop it,” I mutter weakly. “This isn’t you.”

Dean stops, pulls his lips into a wicked smile. Those black eyes pierce my soul. “Isn’t it?”

“Harley!”

At the sound of a gunshot, the entire façade dissolves in a puff of black smoke. I squint my eyes in the darkness, find that I’m strapped to the cot by leather bounds in the basement of the Asylum. At the entrance to the secret room is Gavin and Kat, Kat with the sawed-off raised. They run over to me and immediately start undoing the binds on my wrists and ankles.

“What are you guys doing here?” I ask.

“You were gone for hours,” Kat says. “We decided to come look for you.”

“There was this weird man standing over you,” Gavin says. “When Kat shot him he disappeared.”

That must have been what the black smoke was. “Dean,” I say quietly.

“If that was Dean, you hang out with some creepy people,” Gavin says.

“What do you mean?” I ask. “I know that wasn’t how he normally looks, with the blood and black eyes and everything, but–”

“Harley, there was a doctor standing over you,” Kay says. “He had his hands on the sides of your head, and they were glowing.”

I struggle through this information. “Dr. Ellicott. He must have been projecting those things in my mind.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Gavin says. “Let’s just get out of here.”

When I sit up, my head rings with pressure. I grip the sides, where Dr. Ellicott had his hands, and lower my head between my knees. “I need a minute.”

Kat wanders slowly around the room, pulling back all the curtains to eliminate the maze of partitions. Being able to see the door from the opposite side of the room makes me feel a little bit better, but I cringe at the scraping of the metal rings of the curtains on the rods.

“Hey, check this out,” she says, crouching down in front of a small iron surgical cabinet. Gavin goes to her side and I follow slowly, still supporting my head. It looks like an ordinary cabinet to me, until I notice a small tuft of gray hair sticking out from the side of the door.

“Let me through.” I step between Gavin and Kat, open the cabinet and release a wave of putrid flesh. Dr. Ellicott’s corpse is crammed inside. But it’s not the expected pile of bones. The body is covered in mummified, wrinkled skin, and over it is the tatters of a surgical smock.

“That’s just gross,” Gavin says, pinching his nose and turning away.

“Get my duffel bag,” I tell Kat. She grabs it from where it sits by the cot and hands it to me. I set it down and unzip it. Dig out salt, lighter fluid and a book of matches.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Whenever there’s a spirit or ghost around, it usually has ties to something still on Earth,” I say as I pour salt on the body and douse it in lighter fluid. “Sometimes it’s an artifact. More often than not, it’s a piece of the body. You need to destroy the remains. Salt purifies it.” I strike a match and get to my feet. “Stand back.” They obey, and just as I’m about to toss the match on the body, Kat screams, and a wheeled metal table comes flying at me, knocking me to the floor. The match goes out.

“Seriously?” I cry.

Dr. Ellicott is back, standing in front of Gavin, who freezes in fear. Ellicott reaches out for Gavin’s head, his creepy face twisted into a genuine smile. Gavin screams on contact.

“Don’t be afraid,” Ellicott tells Gavin kindly. “I’m going to help you. I’m going to make you _all_ better.”

“Like hell you are,” I say, and toss another lighted match on the body.

Ellicott’s spirit shrieks, though his mouth doesn’t move. It’s a wraithlike screeching, like nails on a chalkboard. He seems to blacken and char right in front of our eyes before disappearing altogether, blowing away like black paper.

I slump back against the wall and grasp my chest. It’s over. Finally.

We reach the front of the Asylum as dawn breaks. I stand with Gavin and Kat on the safe side of the fence, next to a little gray Volkswagen Bug that I hadn’t noticed on my way in.

“Thank you,” Kat says.

“Yeah, thanks,” Gavin says, slipping his arm around her waist. She removes it. I guess she was serious. Relationship over.

I nod. “Just…no more haunted asylums, okay?”

They agree and get in the car. Gavin waves as he drives away. I stand there, watching the little car fade into the distance, and finally allow myself to feel a little bit of well-deserved relief. I did it. I finished a job all by myself. Saved some kids, killed a spirit. Sure, I suffered further mental anguish in the process, but all in a day’s work, right?

Then, as if the universe is playing some sick joke, my phone rings, and the caller ID says it’s Dean. I shoot a nasty glance back at the Asylum before answering the call.

“Hey, Dean.”

“Hi, Harley. How’s everything?”

I let myself relax at the sound of his voice. Try not to remember that the last time I let myself relax around him, he turned into a demon and tried to kill me. But that was all in my head.

“It’s good…it’s…it’s great to hear your voice, Dean,” I say with a long sigh. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Dean says. Of course. No chick-flick moments. I smile sadly, though he can’t see it. “Look, we finished up in Lawrence. One of John’s old buddies tipped us off to something in Fort Dodge. We wanted to head there next.”

“Oh, all right,” I say. “How did it go at your house?”

Dean is quiet. I can almost picture him staring off at nothing while he figures out what to say. “It was…a lot to go through. My mom showed up.”

“What?” I gasp. “Tell me what happened.”

“Not now,” he says. “Will you come meet us in Iowa?”

“Yes,” I say immediately. I don’t even have to think. I want to go back. I miss him too much. I miss him, Sam, the Impala, everything about what we are. It was interesting working on my own, but I’m not cut out for it. I need them. “I have some things to finish up here, first. I could probably get there by tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest.”

“Okay. See you then,” he says, and hangs up.

I close the phone slowly and clutch it against my chest. Finally, something goes well. I was right to spend some time apart. I honestly thought I’d be gone for weeks. Turns out three days was all I needed to get some perspective.

The drive back to the motel is strangely freeing. I have the windows down, though the radio doesn’t work so all I have to listen to is the sound of the wind. But it’s okay. Nothing could get me down right now.

At the motel, I pack up my things and take a shower. I feel strangely violated after everything that happened in the Asylum tonight, and the hot steam helps alleviate that a bit. I get out, dress, dry my hair. Maybe I’ll get some breakfast before I hit the road. Scratch that, maybe I’ll get lunch. I check the clock when I get out of the shower and find that it’s already after noon. It’s only a five hour drive to Fort Dodge. I’ll get there in no time.

Then I remember that the car isn’t mine. I have to return it today. I grumble about this the entire way to the junkyard, and consider just taking it until I remember the idiot owner has my money. So, reluctantly, I return the car. Find a bus station. Buy a ticket. Wait for a ride. My five hour journey just got extended to nine.

The bus finally arrives and ten minutes later it leaves the station. It’s almost three o’clock and I get antsy at the slow progression of the Greyhound.

Sam calls me. I answer the phone with a little bite to my tone.

“Whoa, there,” Sam says. “What’s going on?”

“I’m just stuck on a bus,” I say. “What are you up to?”

“We’re in Fort Dodge. Followed a lead from Frank Olson, it led us to a Rawhead.”

“A Rawhead? Damn, I’ve never seen one of those in person. They’re so rare. Where is it?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out. A family said their basement was haunted. The two kids described a ragged-looking leathery skinned man with clawed hands and feet. That’s good enough for me.”

“I’ll say.” I shake my head in frustration as the bus comes to a slow stop at the border of Illinois and Iowa to let off passengers. “I can’t take this. It’s taking forever. I probably won’t make the search tonight. Let me know how it goes though, yeah?”

“Sure thing,” Sam says. I go to hang up the phone, but he yells my name.

“Yeah?” I say.

“Thank you,” he says. “For coming back. Dean’s…well, I really thought he wasn’t going to make it when we were back home.”

“I could never leave you guys,” I say, and hang up before my eyes well with tears. This love stuff sure makes me mushy.

I lean my head against the cool glass and watch the sun disappear behind the horizon. Under cover of darkness is when Dean and Sam would go into the house. I grit my teeth, internally kicking myself for not stopping by Bobby’s and getting my car before this whole ordeal.

Finally, the bus is an hour from Fort Dodge. I grip the edges of my seat, picking at the seams in the cushion, growing more anxious and impatient by the second. Now I know why Dean drives everywhere. It’s so difficult when you’re not in control.

I close my eyes, the anxiety finally wearing me out, and get a mere three minutes of rest when my phone rings. It’s Sam again.

“Hey, Sam, that was fast. How’d it go?”

“Where are you?” Sam asks. His voice is shaky, full of worry.

I sit up straight in my seat. “Sam? What’s going on?” There’s nothing but silence on the other end of the line. Finally, I hear Sam’s broken breathing, like he’s fighting back tears.

“It’s Dean.”


	11. Faith

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So, how the hell does a Taser shoot 100,000 volts of electricity?? Come on, Kripke. 50,000 at the most.
> 
> Dean almost dies, which further stresses his and Harley's relationship. But maybe you'll like the ending.
> 
> "Sam adopts the role of the strong griever and finds us some dinner and a motel. I sit in the front seat of the Impala, shaking slightly, trying to fight the visions of what life will be like a month from now. How it’s probably going to be just like this. Sam driving in Dean’s old spot. Me riding shotgun, never having to shut my cakehole again because the driver is so petulant about picking the music…"
> 
> Sam and Harley have a heart-to-heart. 
> 
> Yet again I remind you that this is just the Faith episode with a lot of my editing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I took out a lot of cheesy sappy crap between Harley and Dean. I hate that I even wrote those words in the beginning, and thought they were ok the million times I re-read this damn chapter. All chick-flick moments said adios, bitchachos.

People say when they first receive bad news they feel a sort of imminent shock and disbelief. That’s an incredible understatement. When my dad died, I held him as the life left his body. Seeing everything happen right in front of me helped ease that shock, and I dealt with the resulting emotions later on. But when Sam drops the bomb that Dean was electrocuted with 100,000 volts of electricity and suffered a massive heart attack, these little pinpricks of pain course through my body. And when he says that the doctor’s report wasn’t good, that Dean’s heart is damaged beyond repair, I stop breathing for a moment, my heart begins to race, and I’m so consumed by anguish that I can’t form a coherent thought.

This goddamn bus needs to hurry the fuck up. I barely heard Sam say that he took Dean to St. Helena’s. The last half-hour to the bus station in Fort Dodge drags on like an eternity. Even though Dean is now conscious and resting, I feel like at any moment his life could end and I will never see him again.

Just that thought triggers hyperventilation. I grip my stomach, press my forehead to the back of the seat in front of me, and try to focus on breathing, all the while pleading, _Please don’t die, Dean_. Please don’t die.

I’ve got my backpack on and the duffel slung across my body when the bus rolls to a stop. I rudely shove my way to the front and leap down the three steps. At the end of the sidewalk, the corner of 5th and Burke Avenue, I look around, trying to figure out the fastest way to the hospital. I ask someone where it is, and they say it’s only a few blocks away. I could run there faster than it would take to get a taxi.

With my backpack and duffel bouncing along my body, delivering a nice amount of bruising in the process since I have a crowbar and two shotguns in the duffel, I run four and a half blocks to St. Helena’s. I burst through the front doors of the lobby gasping for breath, welcoming the coolness of the air conditioned hospital. I reach the registration desk and get out between breaths, “There was a patient – admitted – for electrocution. Heart attack.”

“Name?” the bored receptionist asks.

I stare blankly at her because I don’t know what name Sam gave them. We don’t have insurance or any medical history on record, so it wouldn’t matter what name we used, but Dean Winchester is technically considered dead after the incident in St. Louis. I’m about to tell the receptionist never mind and consider finding another way past the front desk when Sam calls my name. I turn to see him walking away from a couple of police officers.

“Sam!” I cry, and throw myself at him. I wrap my arms around him so tight I know I hurt him, but he doesn’t protest. Just hugs me back.

“Hey,” he says quietly.

“How’s he doing?” I ask, although it’s pointless.

“He’s resting still,” Sam says. He looks so worn out. “They gave him a few weeks. A month, at most.”

“Oh, my God,” I groan. If I had eaten anything in the past few hours I’d sure see it now. My stomach churns and threatens to make a show of bile. I try to force it down. “What room?”

“This way,” he says. We completely abandon the receptionist and head to the third floor.

“So what happened?” I ask Sam as we wait for an elevator.

“I didn’t see it. We found the two kids in the basement, hiding in a cupboard, just as the Rawhead came out. I was getting the kids upstairs when Dean shot at it with the Taser. He just had to go all out, get the M26. He fried the Rawhead, all right, but there was water in the basement. The electricity must have conducted from the Rawhead to Dean.”

“Jeeze,” I mutter.

“Yeah. He was out cold until I called you.”

“Have you seen him yet?”

“No. Talked with the doctor and the cops.”

We reach the third floor. Go down the hall to room 307. I stop by the window and look through the blinds. If I wasn’t already breathless from the run, Dean’s condition would make me lose it. I’ve never seen him look so terrible. Dark circles under his eyes. Pale. Weak. I shudder.

“You coming?” Sam asks quietly.

“Sure,” I whisper.

Sam goes in the room but I still hover in the doorway. I really don’t know what I’m so afraid of. As Sam approaches Dean’s bed, Dean says in a feeble voice, with his eyes glued to the TV set, “Have you ever actually watched these commercials? It’s terrible. Worse than daytime TV.”

With a sigh, Sam shakes his head. Of course, Dean would try to crack jokes when he’s dying. “I talked to your doctor,” Sam tells him.

“That fabric softener teddy bear. Oh, I’m gonna hunt that little bitch down.” His words are full of his usual sarcasm but lack the energy. It sounds almost haunting.

“Dean,” Sam says, trying to show he’s not in the mood.

Dean clicks the TV off. Looks up at his brother. “Yeah, all right. Well, looks like you’re going to leave town without me.”

“What are you talking about?” Sam says in disbelief. “I’m not going to leave you here.”

“Hey, you better take care of that car or I swear, I’ll haunt your ass.”

“I don’t think that’s funny,” Sam says.

Dean makes a face. “Oh, come on, it’s a little funny.” Sam looks back at me, fighting tears. Dean looks outside. “Look, Sammy, what can I say, man? It’s a dangerous gig. I drew the short straw. That’s it, end of story.”

Hearing how Dean is so accepting of his death gives me the push I need to finally enter the room. Dropping my backpack and duffel along the way, I stride right up to where he lies like a helpless child, sunken in the flimsy mattress and pile of pillows, and point at his chest. He manages to look small in the hospital gown, which is some feat, and I can’t believe seeing him like that still allows me to have the resolve to practically yell at him. “Don’t you talk like that, all right?”

“Harley,” Dean says in disbelief.

I grit my teeth, take a deep breath. I can’t cry. Won’t. “Yeah.”

“She’s right, Dean,” Sam says. “We still have options.”

“What options?” Dean scoffs. “Burial or cremation?” I cringe at his blunt words. “I know it’s not easy, but I’m gonna die. And you two can’t stop it.”

“Watch me,” Sam challenges him in a low voice, then turns away and walks to the other side of the room.

I stand there over Dean, working up the courage to say something. What is there to say, though? All those petty thoughts I had for the past few weeks, the fights I almost started, leaving, the apologies for leaving, none of that matters now. So what can I do?

“Oh, Dean.” I sink down on the edge of the bed. Forget fighting tears. I can’t hold it back any longer. I smash my face against his chest and sob.

“Hey, none of that,” Dean says. He lifts my chin. “Glad you’re here.”

Crying seems unsuitable. “Why the hell weren’t you more careful?” I snap. I restrain myself from punching him. “How could you let this happen?”

Dean just shrugs.

“Oh, God,” I mutter, and lean down to bury my face in his chest once more. I seriously don’t know which emotion to express and it’s driving me up the wall. “I’m not blaming you. Just…why?”

“Short straw,” he says quietly.

“Well, death can just shove that short straw up its ass,” I grumble into his hospital gown.

He chuckles and rubs my back. “There’s my girl.”

I emerge from his gown and look at his face. I saw the dark circles from the window, but I couldn’t see how up close they look like bruises, his eyes are slightly sunken, the green a little faded. I reach out and touch his cheek, note the cut on his forehead that disappears behind his hairline.

“Missed you,” I whisper.

“Missed you, too." We kiss, and then he says lightheartedly, “Hey, uh, I guess all that fast food finally got to me, huh?” I search for the courage to find that amusing and come up empty.

A nurse arrives to check on Dean. I leave the bed and go over to Sam and bite my nail while I watch the nurse replace the bag of fluids to Dean’s IV. Dean must really be feeling lousy because he hasn’t even looked at her. Even when I’m around, he’s not that careful about where his eyes wander. Right now, though, they’re glued on me.

“What are we going to do, Sam?” I whisper.

“I don’t know,” he says quietly.

“Visiting hours are over,” the nurse tells us.

Dean struggles to sit up. “Whoa, whoa, can’t they stay?”

“I’m sorry,” the nurse says, though she doesn’t sound sorry at all.

“Come on, I’m gonna die in a few weeks and you’re not going to let me keep visitors overnight?” Dean snaps.

“Hospital rules,” she says, before giving Sam and I a look and disappearing out into the hall.

“It’s okay, Dean,” I say. “We’ll be back first thing in the morning.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbles, crossing his arms over his chest.

Sam rests his hand on Dean’s shoulder. “See you soon, man.” Dean nods.

I resume my seat on the bed, take Dean’s face gently between my hands. I’m not saying goodbye to him. I won’t put any sanction on his condition. So I just kiss him deeply and absorb every tiny movement, every touch.

Reluctantly, I break the kiss. Dean hesitates with his eyes closed and his lips still puckered. His face falls into a tranquil smile. “Now I really don’t want you to leave.”

I grin. “I’ll be back in the morning.” And then I have to let Sam drag me out of the hospital and down to the car because I can’t leave Dean on my own.

Sam adopts the role of the strong griever and finds us some dinner and a motel. I sit in the passenger seat of the Impala, shaking slightly, trying to fight visions of what life will be like a month from now. How it’s probably going to be just like this. Sam driving in Dean’s old spot. Me riding shotgun, never having to shut my cakehole again because the driver is so petulant about picking the music…

“We stop at nothing to save him,” I say when we’ve settled in our room. We have our laptops, books, both our dad’s journals, and anything that could help us research Dean’s condition spread out on a long table in front of a sofa. We have a box of hot coffee on the counter and a small supply of energy drinks for backup.

“I know,” Sam says.

“I mean it.” I run my finger over a particularly dark page in my dad’s journal. “There’s absolutely nothing I wouldn’t do to keep him alive.”

Sam pulls his eyebrows together. “What do you got there?” He takes the journal from me, and his eyes bulge as he reads the first line. “A crossroads demon? Are you insane?”

I shrug. That’s the second time in two days someone’s asked me that. “Maybe. I just spent last night in an insane asylum. Maybe it got to me.”

“Cut the crap, Harley,” Sam snaps. “You’re not making a deal with a demon. We find some other way to save Dean. You’re no use to us dead.”

“I wouldn’t be dead _now_ ,” I mutter. “In ten years, maybe.”

Sam shakes his head in disgust. “Just shut up! I already have to deal with Dean dying, I’m not about to think about you dying, too.”

“Fine.” I slam the journal shut and pull my laptop towards me. “I’m going to research ways to get Dean a new heart, then.”

“Get real,” Sam says. “Transplant waiting lists could take years. We have weeks.”

“I don’t see you coming up with any golden ideas!” I snap at him.

“God, is this what it was like with you and Dean working together those two years? It’s no wonder he didn’t leave.”

I get to my feet so fast I send a pile of books to the ground. “Shut your fucking mouth,” I hiss.

“I’m sorry,” Sam says quickly, his face draining of color. “I didn’t mean it.”

“Whatever!” I roughly push him back against the cushions and dig the car keys out of his jacket pocket. “Give me those!”

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“None of your business!” I scream, and slam the motel door behind me.

Hot tears stream down my cheeks. I get in the Impala, shuffle through Dean’s cassettes until I find the angriest metal music I can find, and shove the cassette in the player. With the music full blast and the windows down, I peel out of the parking lot with the tires squealing and hit the highway.

I don’t pay attention to where I go. I just drive and drive and drive until the moon disappears and the sun slowly takes its place. There’s no use blaming Sam for what he said. Tension runs high and we’re bound to get a little irritable. But we can’t fight if we’re going to save Dean.

I wear myself out driving through the night. I return to the motel around eight in the morning, just in time for visiting hours at the hospital. In the room, Sam is in the same spot I left him. Books lay out on their spines, there’s a notepad with pages of scribbled notes, both journals are open. Now I feel bad. Sam doesn’t hold it against me, though. He nods to me, I nod back, and just like that we’re back on the same page.

“Find anything?” I ask.

“Not much,” Sam says. When I get closer to him, I see that his eyes are red and puffy. “I…tried to call Dad again.”

“And?”

“He won’t pick up. Not even for Dean.”

I sit down on the sofa next to him. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s so pathetic! How could he do this to us?”

I don’t have an answer for him. Truth is, I can’t even begin to imagine what makes John do the things he does. Just like always, we’re on our own.

“I found a contact in his journal. Joshua Mallard. Next to the words ‘Faith Healer’.”

“Faith healer? You know Dean will never go for that. I’m not even sure _I’d_ go for that.”

“Can’t be any worse than a crossroads demon,” Sam points out.

“Watch it,” I warn him. “So what did he say?”

“I left a voicemail,” Sam says. “Seems to be pattern here, huh?”

I look at him sympathetically. “Come on, let’s go see Dean.”

We pick up some coffee and pastries before heading to the hospital. At the coffee shop, one of the workers brings out a fresh baked apple pie. One glance between Sam and I and we both know that we have to bring Dean a slice.

Sam gets our visitors badges at the front desk, and I find out that their alias was David and Peter Berkowitz. I laugh at the names, but Sam explains that he had to hand over a credit card when there was no record of insurance, and that was the only card he had on him at the time.

Dean’s face brightens when I give him the pie. Sam and I sip our coffees while Dean takes slow, calculated bites, and we swap stories about the jobs we spent apart. Dean makes me sit on the bed with him, and I have absolutely no objection to that. I snuggle in, grateful for his closeness, the warmth that begins to come back to his skin.

I went through an ordeal at the Asylum, but it was nothing compared to what happened in Kansas. The boys went to Missouri, the psychic, and took her back to their old house. Missouri sensed two spirits in the little girl’s room, which used to be Sam’s nursery. It wasn’t the demon that killed their mom and Jessica like they sort of hoped it would be, but a different presence than the one Missouri sensed when John brought her to the house 22 years ago. She said that the Winchester house was basically a magnet for paranormal activity because of what happened to them, and that attracted a nasty poltergeist. That explained one of the spirits.

After Sam, Dean and Missouri purified the house with one of Missouri’s concoctions – and almost got each of them killed in turn by the poltergeist – a spirit emerged as a flaming figure, scaring the family out of the house. That left the poltergeist all alone with Sam and Dean. They were pretty much toast until that flaming figure dissipated into Mary Winchester’s spirit. After a brief reunion with her sons, Mary’s spirit engulfed the poltergeist. She destroyed herself to save her boys.

My story could never compare with that. Theirs was gut-wrenching and heartbreaking. When Sam leaves to go to the bathroom, Dean tells me that he wishes I had been there. That the only reason he thought he would be able to go back and face his old home was because I was going to be with him. If I didn’t feel guilty before, I definitely do now. 

When Sam comes back I relay my adventure in the Asylum. It gets particularly hard when I finally have to tell Sam about what happened with Logan and my mother. Like Dean, it comes as complete astonishment. I just pray I don’t lose his trust. Hopefully this will be the last time I have to bring it up. I describe the scene in my head where Sam tried to kill Dean, which sort of amuses them, but I leave out the one about Dean trying to kill me. There was something different about that one. I can’t quite put my finger on the difference, or maybe I’m refusing to. Because it didn’t feel like a memory or a fabricated act. It felt like a vision. 

Sam unfolds the armchair in the corner and forms it into a lounge chair and dozes off. I’m pretty beat, too. My eyelids grow heavy and I rest my head in the crook of Dean’s arm, fighting with the happiness I feel because I know it won’t last.

Dean rests his cheek on my head. “Some company you guys are.”

“At least we’re here,” I mumble before yawning.

“Yeah,” he agrees.

I end up falling asleep, comforted by Dean’s presence. We made a promise over two years ago to never let each other go. It may not have been those three words, but now I know there’s no denying that he’s always loved me.

Sam and I get kicked out of Dean’s room in the early evening after Dean goes pale and his machines start beeping violently. A couple of nurses and a doctor rush in and attempt to stabilize him after another heart attack. This one was minor, but with his heart already in a such weakened state, it definitely decreased his lifespan by half. I cling to Sam while we watch from the hall, desperate to get back in there and hold onto Dean. The doctor doesn’t let us in, though. He sedated Dean and said to come back tomorrow during visiting hours.

I don’t think I have the ability to cry this time. I’m flat out angry. I rave and rant to Sam the entire drive back to the motel, cursing God and doctors and swearing to make this right. Sam just nods, agreeing with me but not being as vocal about it. I wish he would. This whole calm demeanor of his is really putting me off. He’s hurting inside, so why can’t he show it? I guess that’s what it means to be a Winchester.

John’s contact, Joshua, returns Sam’s call. The faith healer is in Fort City, Nebraska, and apparently he has a very, very good reputation. With all of our other options pretty much squandered, this is the path we have to take. Getting Dean there is what’s going to be the challenge.

It’s another sleepless night for us. We lay on our beds, facing each other in the dark, and talk in hushed voices. Sam tells me things that he didn’t want to say in front of Dean. I’m glad for this, because I have a few things to say to him as well.

“I can’t believe I saw my mom,” Sam says quietly. “It’s the first time I got to see her where she wasn’t in a picture.”

I don’t really have anything to say to that. I saw my mom while we were apart as well, only she was either distraught or dead. And she certainly didn’t sacrifice herself for me. She took her life selfishly.

“I learned a bit about my dad, too,” Sam continues. “Dean and I talked to a mechanic friend of his. Told us how stubborn he was. That’s not news, though.” I can just see Sam’s face grow somber in the pale moonlight shining through the window. “Apparently he was a great husband. Really loved my mom. Doted on us as kids. But that changed after the fire, after my mom died.”

“Something that traumatic can change anyone,” I say softly.

“Not the way it changed him. And Dean still thinks it was wrong of me to leave.”

“I don’t think any of that matters now,” I whisper, thinking back to yesterday when I was struggling for words at Dean’s bedside.

“Yeah.”

“Did Dean say anything more about your vision?”

“No, but Missouri did.”

“What did she say?”

Sam’s eyes find the floor. “She says I’m starting to change. Whatever that means.”

I think about how his vision allowed him to find and save a family. “Maybe you’re changing in a good way, Sam. Maybe you’re going to be able to help people in a more significant way than we already do.”

“Yeah,” he says again.

My stomach tightens with the anticipation of bringing up my own news. “At least your vision was good.”

Sam furrows his brows. “What do you mean?”

“There was one more hallucination in the Asylum. It was different than the others, not like a memory. Dean had this ancient blade and a mark on his arm, and his eyes were black like a demon. He tried to kill me.” Then, a sickening thought comes to me. “Of course, if we can’t save Dean, it won’t be a real vision after all,” I add grimly.

But Sam doesn’t seem to hear me. “What did the mark look like?” he asks.

“Hmm…like, a slanted number seven with two perpendicular lines across it. And it was dark red, like a burn.”

“And the blade?”

“It was old and ugly. Like bone that’s been in the sun for too long. It really didn’t look all that sharp, but it was. One side of the blade had smaller bones poking out here and there. Kind of like teeth.”

“That might be the Mark of Cain. And the First Blade. It’s from the Bible.”

“Why would a psychotic psychiatrist project a vision of a demon Dean with the Mark of Cain in my head?” I wonder aloud, but neither of us have an answer.

With a long sigh, Sam rolls on to his back. We don’t speak for a long while. His breathing stays the same, so I don’t think he’s fallen asleep. I ask, anyway.

“No, I’m awake still.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“I just…started thinking about Jess.”

“Want to talk about it?” I ask. He shrugs. “It’s been four months, Sam. Sooner or later you’re going to need to let it out.”

“I’ve just been so consumed by anger and vengeance that I haven’t given myself a chance to really be sad,” he says. “Except when I met Lori.”

“Lori?” I repeat. “That girl from Iowa?”

“Yeah. I thought I was doing okay, you know? I could function fine, do my job. I didn’t realize how messed up I was until she kissed me.” He turns back to his side.

“Wow, Sam, I didn’t realize you two got that close.”

“We didn’t. She was upset about her dad and her roommate and that guy. And I was there protecting her…but I stopped it. All I could picture was Jessica’s face.”

“It’s going to take some time to get over her, but it’s okay to move on, you know.”

“I was with her for a year and a half. That’s not something I can just walk away from. If Dean had died yesterday, do you think you could just move on?” His question is genuine, because I know that correlation is the only way I can begin to understand the pain he went through when he lost Jessica, but it’s enough to make me feel sick. Silence is my answer as I roll over and force myself into an uneasy slumber.

In the morning, Sam and I make plans to head to Nebraska. I still think we should continue researching other options as well, since having only one plan of action could seriously backfire on us. Secretly, I haven’t entirely excluded the idea of using a crossroads demon. I know I'd be sealing my fate if I made the deal, but I'd rather have ten more years with Dean than a lifetime without him.

Sam asks if I want any breakfast, but I’m too consumed in research to think about food. Then he says he wants to head to the hospital for a bit. I would love to go see Dean, but I need to see what else I can find in case this faith healer doesn’t work out. So Sam heads out on his own.

He doesn’t make it very far. When he opens the motel room door, he finds Dean leaning against the jamb, about to keel over. “What the hell are you doing here?” Sam asks, sounding surprised, happy and confused all at once.

“I checked myself out,” Dean says.

“What, are you crazy?”

Dean enters the room and makes his way to a chair, leaning on everything within reach for support. “Well, I’m not gonna die in a hospital where the nurses aren’t even hot,” he grumbles. And then we make eye contact. “I mean, where you aren’t there, of course.”

“Uh-huh,” I say, but I let it go. For the first time ever, his jabs about other women don’t bother me.

Sam shuts the door. “You know, this whole I-Laugh-In-The-Face-Of-Death thing? It’s crap. I can see right through it.”

“Yeah, whatever, dude.” Dean surveys the room. His face forms into a look of disgust. Sam and I haven’t exactly been the cleanest people the last couple of days. We refused housekeeping, resulting in dirty sheets and unmade beds. Food and coffee trash litter the table and counter. Every inch of the table in front of the sofa is covered by books or papers or computers. Books from the trunk of the Impala and the library are stacked in piles on the floor. Our clothes and bags are kind of everywhere. Don’t even get me started on the condition of the bathroom. We’ve had more pressing matters on our mind lately.

“Have you guys even slept? You look worse than me.”

“We’ve been doing research for two days,” I say. “Scouring the internet, checking books. Sam called practically every contact in _both_ journals.”

“For what?” Dean asks.

Sam and I exchange appalled looks. Does Dean really think we wouldn’t try to find a way to save him?

“For a way to help you,” Sam says. “One of Dad’s friends, Joshua, returned my call last night. Told me about a guy in Nebraska. A specialist.”

Dean sighs sarcastically. “You’re not gonna let me die in peace, are you?”

“We’re not going to let you die, period.” I get up from the sofa and plant myself aggressively in front of Dean. Then, as sternly as I can, I say, “We’re going,” and Dean makes the proper choice by not arguing with me.

We’re in for about a 250 mile drive to Fort City. Sam drives and I ride shotgun while Dean sleeps in the back seat. It takes all the energy I have in me, which isn’t much, to not get my hopes up about this faith healer.

Sam, Dean and I all have very different opinions when it comes to faith and God. Sam is a believer. He leads a life that involves prayer, and despite the horrors he goes through on a daily basis, he still has faith in God. Dean, on the other hand, is not a religious person. While Sam looks to the events in his life as tests, Dean sees them as betrayal. In the same way he doesn’t understand how Sam could have had a vision, he can’t accept God. If he can’t see it, he can’t believe it. I’m a little different. I know God exists, but I don’t religiously pray. I don’t go to church. My… _faith,_ I guess, falters from time to time. This faith healer may solidify my belief, though. If we take Dean to Nebraska and he is healed, I’ll know without a doubt that God is looking out for us.

It pours down rain as we cross the border into Nebraska. The weather calms into a slight drizzle with thick, dark clouds packing the sky when we reach Fort City. The Impala bumps along a rutted gravel road towards a large, white tent set up in an empty field next to a very old Victorian-style house. People make their way to the tent across the muddy ground, some with heads bowed against the wind, others braving the use of umbrellas that attempt to fly away. What surprises me, though, is the amount of people here. There’s got to be close to a hundred ailing people and their hopeful family members, all yearning for the same thing we are.

Sam parks and hurries to the back seat to help Dean. Dean opens his own door and grimaces as he pulls himself out of the car. Sam grabs his arm before he falls. Dean doesn’t seem to notice. Instead, he looks around with narrowed eyes.

I get out of the car and pull up my hood against the wind. I hope we can get Dean inside before he learns too much, but a sign posted a few feet in front of the tent reads: “The Church of Roy LeGrange. Faith Healer. Witness the Miracle.” We’re shit out of luck.

Angrily, Dean shoves Sam’s helping hands off. “I got it. Man, you are a lying bastard. Thought you said we’re going to see a doctor.”

“I believe I said a _specialist_ ,” Sam says as we start our slow trudge through the muck to the tent, and I realize how that one word made all the difference in Dean’s head.

Dean stumbles over his feet and curses. He lost a lot of strength on the drive over and he can barely walk. He won’t accept Sam’s help, but I make him take my arm. I won’t have him falling over into the mud and making a fool of himself. That will just make him angrier.

“I can’t believe you brought me here to see some guy who heals people out of a tent,” Dean grumbles through his teeth.

“Reverend LeGrange is a great man,” an elderly woman says with conviction. She hobbles past us, leaning on a walker that she unsticks from the mud with every step. Even with the arthritis and other complications she must be plagued with, she still manages to walk faster than Dean, which upsets him.

“Yeah, that’s nice,” Dean gripes.

The next person we see is a little more on Dean’s side. He bickers with a Sheriff and he doesn’t look all that happy. “Man, I have a right to protest! This man is a fraud, and he’s milking all these people out of their hard-earned money!”

But the Sheriff will have none of it. “Sir, this is a place of worship. Let’s go, move it.” He guides the man away.

“I take it he’s not part of the flock,” Dean says sarcastically.

“When people see something they can’t explain, there’s controversy,” I tell him.

“I mean, come on, Harley, a faith healer? I can’t believe you’re in on this.” Dean’s legs nearly give way again and I struggle to stay upright. When we’re steady, I pat his cold hand.

“Maybe it’s time to have a little faith, Dean.”

“You know what I’ve got faith in? Reality. Knowing what’s really going on.”

I throw an annoyed look at Sam, signaling him to take over. This was his idea, he should deal with Dean. Sam hangs his head.

“How can you be a skeptic?” Sam asks Dean. “With the things we see every day?”

“Exactly. We _see_ them. We know they’re real.”

“But if you know evil’s out there, how can you not believe good’s out there, too?”

Dean stops walking. “Because I’ve seen what evil does to good people.”

A young, pretty, blond woman overhears us and comments, “Maybe God works in mysterious ways.”

I was able to look past Dean’s remark about the nurses this morning, but I get irritated when he flashes his old, breathtaking smile and tells the woman, “Maybe he does. I think you just turned me around on the subject.” I roll my eyes at Sam, and he shakes his head knowingly.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” the woman says, not the least bit affected by Dean’s wiles. Still, she politely offers her hand. “I’m Layla.”

“Dean. This is my brother, Sam, and my girlfriend, Harley.”

For all I know, my heart was just electrocuted with 100,00 of electricity, and I’m in such disbelief that I rudely ignore the woman’s handshake. In the entire two and a half years since our relationship escalated past friendship, Dean has never once acknowledged me as his girlfriend, let alone to an attractive woman, except that time in Jericho when it was just part of our cover. This is different. This was real. I catch Sam’s eye and he grins. I wonder if he had anything to do with this while they were in Kansas.

“So, if you’re not a believer, then why are you here?” Layla asks.

Dean nods to Sam and I. “Apparently these guys here believe enough for me.”

“Come on, Layla,” an older woman calls from the tent entrance. “It’s about to start.” Layla smiles at us before she joins her.

We follow, but at Dean’s slow pace. At the tent entrance, on one of the flaps held open by a hook, is another sign. This one reads: “Welcome All Faiths. True Believers Revival.”

“Bet they’re not as good as Creedence Clearwater Revival, huh?” Dean says with a grin. Sam rolls his eyes and I don’t respond. “Come on, my jokes are funny.” We continue to ignore him, so he grumbles, “I’m gonna die, so I’m gonna tell my jokes. And they’re funny.”

The tent is full of people looking for seats on long, wooden benches. A small stage at the back has a lectern decked with candles and a table filled with various religious artifacts, some that I haven’t seen before. Dean nudges me and I follow his gaze to the top corner of the tent to our right. A security camera perches there with an entire view of the crowd.

“Yeah, peace, love, and trust all over,” Dean says sarcastically.

“This is a church, not Woodstock,” I whisper.

“Still, shouldn’t they have some level of _faith_ in their community?” he whispers back.

“Maybe the Reverend likes to revisit his work,” I suggest.

“Will you two shut up and come on,” Sam says as he pushes us down the aisle, but Dean slips his grip. 

“Where are you going? Let’s sit here.” Dean edges his way to a bench by the exit, as far from the front as he could possibly get.

“No. We’re sitting up close.” Sam gets a better handle on Dean’s jacket and hauls him to his feet.

“What? Why?” Dean looks at me weakly.

“Let’s go,” I say.

“Oh, come on,” Dean growls. “This teaming up on me thing is getting real old.”

We walk farther up the aisle. Dean stumbles again.

“You all right?” Sam asks him.

“This is ridiculous. I’m good, dude, get off me.” Dean slaps Sam’s hands away.

Sam scowls at him and points to an empty spot in the second row, behind Layla and the older woman. “Perfect.”

“Yeah, perfect,” Dean mutters sarcastically.

“You take the aisle,” Sam tells Dean. He guides me in first, then sits down. Dean remains standing, looking around at all the people still gathering – or possibly planning his escape. Sam reaches to help him down, but Dean raises his hand irritably to stop him.

On stage, a tall, balding blind man with dark sunglasses is led to the lectern by a middle aged woman. She guides his hands to the edges of the podium and then steps back. The man, the preacher, Reverend Roy LeGrange, clears his throat, and the entire tent falls silent. Dean hastily drops down on the bench.

“Every morning, my wife, Sue Ann, reads me the news. Never seems good, does it?” the Reverend says to his congregation. The crowd murmurs their agreement. “Seems like there’s always someone committing some immoral, unspeakable act. But, I say to you, God is watching.”

There’s a chorus of “Yes, he is” throughout the crowd.

“God rewards the good, and He punishes the corrupt,” Reverend LeGrange continues, and the crowd nods and cheers in unison. I look around at the people who take to this so seriously. Even though this is just a tent, I have never set foot in a church for mass in my entire life. There’s a strange, uplifting sentiment about it.

“It is the Lord who does the healing here, friends,” the Reverend says, and out of the corner of my eye I see Dean shift uncomfortably in his seat. “The Lord who guides me in choosing who to heal by helping me see into people’s hearts.”

The crowd murmurs amongst each other. Dean leans over to us and whispers, “Yeah, and into their wallets.” He wasn’t as quiet as he thought he was, though, because Reverend LeGrange’s head snaps down in Dean’s direction.

“You think so, young man?” he says in a strangely authoritative voice that sends a ripple of fear through my spine even though he didn’t speak any louder than before. The crowd falls silent again and Dean’s face burns red.

“Sorry,” he mumbles.

“No, no. Don’t be,” Reverend LeGrange says. “Just watch what you say around a blind man. We’ve got real sharp ears.” This sends the crowd into a lighthearted bit of laughter. “What’s your name, son?”

Dean clears his throat and looks around hesitantly. “Dean.”

“Dean,” the Reverend says musingly, playing with his name on his lips. Then he nods to himself. “I want you to come up here with me.”

The tent fills with clapping. Sue Ann, the Reverend’s wife, moves forward to the center of the stage and smiles warmly at Dean, inviting him up with open arms. Dean shakes his head, growing nervous, preventing the flushed color from leaving his cheeks.

“No, it’s okay,” he says with an embarrassed chuckle.

“What are you doing?” Sam hisses at him.

“You’ve come here to be healed, haven’t you?” the Reverend asks Dean.

“Well, yeah, but…” He hesitates again, but this just encourages clapping and cheers of reassurance from the crowd. “Maybe you should just pick someone else.”

At the same time, my head and Sam’s whips to the side. I can’t see Sam’s face, but I shoot Dean a deathly look that clearly says if he doesn’t go up there _right_ _now_ I’ll kill him myself. He shrinks back and looks up at the Reverend, who smiles gently.

“Oh, no. _I_ didn’t pick you, Dean. The Lord did,” Reverend LeGrange says calmly. His relaxed demeanor unwittingly arouses more excitement from the crowd.

“Get up there!” Sam says excitedly, falling into the hype of the mass. Dean reluctantly rises and moves slowly to the stage. Sue Ann helps him up and stands next to him for support. When the Reverend approaches Dean, she falls back again.

“You ready?” the Reverend asks.

Dean leans closer. “Look, no disrespect, but, uh, I’m not exactly a believer.”

The Reverend just grins. “You will be, son. You will be.” Then he turns to the crowded tent with his arms wide. “Pray with me, friends!” The crowd lifts their arms up and joins hands. I hold Sam’s hand eagerly and grip it tightly, and he responds with the same enthusiasm. This is better than we could have ever hoped for. We figured we’d be here for weeks, pretty much up until Dean’s dying breath, waiting for a chance for him to be healed.

The Reverend lifts his hands to the sky before placing one on Dean’s shoulder and the other on the side of his face. He bows his head and says quietly, “All right, now. All right, now.”

I can’t see Dean’s expression as his head tilts back and his legs weaken and buckle, forcing him to his knees. The Reverend bends down to keep his contact with Dean’s face.

“All right, now,” the Reverend whispers again, only audible because the tent has grown deathly silent. Dean begins to wobble. He weakly holds his arms out to the side for balance, but it does no good. He breaks contact with the Reverend’s hands and falls onto the stage with a loud _thud_.

“Dean!” Sam and I shout, scaring the people around us into a fit of clapping, and we’re on our feet and at the stage in seconds. I clamber onto the high platform and crawl over to where Dean lies unconscious. I grasp the front of his jacket and desperately shake him.

“Dean! Say something!” I yell in his face. After a painstakingly long moment, he blinks groggily and looks up. His eyes seem out of focus, as he’s facing me but staring past me. A flash of perplexity crosses his face.

“Whoa,” he mumbles.

I help Dean to his feet and the tent erupts into roars and applause. Dean hangs his arm over my shoulders to steady himself, but already he’s a lot stronger than he was when the Reverend first called him up. Sam guides Dean off the stage and we resume our seats. The Reverend finishes his sermon. My mind is elsewhere, though, reveling in the fact that Dean was just healed.

We slowly make our way to the exit, not because Dean can’t walk very fast – he can, now – but because every few feet we’re stopped by someone congratulating him. It takes us about twenty minutes just to leave the tent, and then another hour until we settle at a motel for the night.

Despite wanting some alone time with Dean, I don’t get the chance. We find a place for dinner, in which Dean proceeds to eat three times his usual amount, and then when we get back to the room he showers and goes right to bed. I can’t blame him. He’s been through a hell of a lot the past few days.

Sam and I are still pretty high-strung from the evening’s events. After each of us shower to kill time, we stay up for a bit, playing cards and talking on Sam’s bed. The only real way to see if Dean’s better is if we take him to a doctor. Tomorrow morning we’ll take him to the nearest one and get his heart checked out. 

I don’t even feel bad about sharing a bed with Dean tonight and how it will make Sam feel. He’s alive and has a lot more strength than he did this morning and nothing is going to stop me from being happy about that. Dean is out like a light, but I still crawl into the sheets and pull him close and hold him the entire night.

The following morning during breakfast, Dean doesn’t object to us taking him to a hospital for a check-up. Waiting until he has a slice of pie in front of him to break the news is a large contributing factor in that.

At the hospital, Dean gets a comprehensive workup. A nurse does the usual, listens to his heart, takes his vitals, runs an EKG. Then a technologist arrives with a wheelchair to take him for an echocardiogram. Dean balls up his fists and stares at Sam and I with murder in his eyes before reluctantly taking a seat.

The tech returns with a seething Dean, who is obviously still pissed off that he was carted around the hospital in a wheelchair. After that, a lab tech draws his blood, then it’s just a waiting game until the results come in.

Dean stays on the table, dangling his feet. I walk over to him and put my hands in his. He squeezes them half-heartedly.

“So, you really feel okay?” I ask him.

“I feel fine, Harley,” he says, but his face says he doesn’t. He looks unhappy. Something else occupies his mind.

Sometime later, the doctor enters with a patient folder. He scans over some paperwork. “Well, David, according to all your tests, there’s nothing wrong with your heart. No sign that there ever was. Not that a man your age should be having heart trouble, but, still, it’s strange. It does happen.”

“What do you mean, ‘strange’?” Dean asks.

“Well, just yesterday, a young guy like you…twenty-seven, athletic. Out of nowhere, he has a heart attack.”

Dean nods. “Thanks, Doc.”

“No problem.” The doctor nods goodbye to Sam and I, then leaves the room.

“That’s odd,” Dean says on our way out.

“Maybe it’s a coincidence,” I tell him. “People’s hearts give out all the time.”

“No, they don’t,” Dean says.

The three of us get in the car. Dean resumes his place driving. Sam and I are back to fighting over who gets shotgun again. Sam wins this time.

“Look, do we really have to look this one in the mouth?” Sam says. “Why can’t we just be thankful that the guy saved your life and move on?”

“Because I can’t shake this feeling, that’s why,” Dean says in a low voice.

“What feeling?” I ask.

“When I was healed, I just…I felt wrong. I felt cold.” Dean shudders at the memory. “And for a second, I saw someone. This, uh, this old man in a suit. And I’m telling you, it was a spirit.”

Sam turns to look at me, one eyebrow raised. I shrug.

“But if there was something there, Dean, I think we would have seen it, too,” Sam says. “I mean, I’ve been seeing an awful lot of things lately.”

“Well, excuse me, psychic wonder,” Dean snaps. “But you’re just gonna need a little _faith_ on this one. I’ve been hunting long enough to trust a feeling like this.”

Sam opens his mouth, no doubt to make some sort of comment about how Dean has trouble trusting Sam about things but he’s just supposed to blindly believe Dean, so I reach out and put my hand on his shoulder to quiet him.

“All right, Dean,” I say. “So, what do you want to do?”

“I want you to come with me to visit the Reverend,” Dean says. “Sam, you go check out the heart attack guy.”

Dean drops Sam at the motel to work his magic with the computer locating the victim, and I take his spot in the front seat.

“Why didn’t you want me to help Sam?” I ask.

“Sam can handle that by himself.” Dean reaches across the seat and takes my hand.

My heart flutters, knowing that Dean’s sudden change in his actions towards me aren’t because he was about to die in a few weeks. Here he is, a new man with a new heart, and he still wants me by his side.

Roy and Sue Ann LeGrange welcome us warmly into their home. I misjudged the old house from the outside. Inside it’s in pristine condition. Beautiful, hand-carved wood furniture, hand-sewn drapes, original hardwood floor. I don’t even know where the sofa and armchairs came from, but they’ve got to be well-kept antiques. Dean and I settle together on the sofa with our backs to a wide window and Roy and Sue Ann take the armchairs. Sue Ann pours out tea for us.

“If it wasn’t so cold outside, I’d serve some of my homemade lemonade,” Sue Ann says as she sets down cups and saucers for Dean and I.

“This is fine, thank you,” I say, feeling very British as I mix in sugar and cream.

Dean picks up his cup and gives his little finger a tiny wiggle when Sue Ann isn’t looking. I hide my grin in my tea.

“How are you feeling, Dean?” the Reverend asks.

Dean sips his tea noisily. “I feel great. Just trying to, you know, make sense of what happened.”

“A miracle is what happened,” Sue Ann says with a beaming smile. “Well, miracles come so often around Roy.”

“When did they start?” I ask. “The miracles.”

The Reverend politely finishes chewing a bite of cookie before answering. “I woke up one morning stone blind. Doctors figured out I had cancer. Told me I had maybe a month.”

My eyes shift uneasily to Dean. We know how that feels.

“So, we prayed for a miracle. I grew too weak, but I told Sue Ann, ‘You just keep right on praying’. I went into a coma. Doctors said I wouldn’t wake up, but I did. And the cancer was gone.” The Reverend takes off his sunglasses, revealing pale white eyes. “If it wasn’t for these eyes, no one would believe I’d ever had it.”

“And suddenly you could heal people,” Dean says, still with a hint of skepticism even though he’s proof that the Reverend can.

“I discovered it afterward, yes. God’s blessed me in many ways.”

“His flock just swelled overnight,” Sue Ann says proudly. “And this is just the beginning.”

“Can I ask you one last question?” Dean asks.

“Of course you can,” the Reverend says.

Dean takes a long, deep breath. “Why? Why me? Out of all the sick people, why save me?” He sounds so heartbroken, so undeserving of a second chance at life. I reach out and rest my hand on his knee.

“Well, like I said before, the Lord guides me,” the Reverend says. “I looked into your heart, and you just stood out from all the rest.”

“What did you see in my heart?” Dean asks quietly.

The Reverend smiles, prepared for this question. “A young man with an important purpose. A job to do. And it isn’t finished.”

Dean nods in understanding.

We run out of things to ask, so we listen to a few stories from the Reverend and Sue Ann about their experiences while we finish our tea, and then we thank them and leave.

On the porch steps of the LeGrange’s Victorian house, we run into Layla and her mother, swathed in thick coats to protect from the wind and impending rain.

“Dean, Harley. Hey,” Layla says.

“Hi,” I say, making a point to sound extra polite, since I was inadvertently rude to her yesterday.

“How are you feeling?” she asks Dean.

“I feel good. Cured, I guess.” He laughs awkwardly. “What are you doing here?”

“My mom, she wanted to talk to the Reverend…” Her voice trails off as Sue Ann appears in the doorway.

“Layla?” Sue Ann says. She sounds a little bit annoyed.

“Yes, I’m here again,” Layla says softly.

“Well, I’m sorry, but Roy is resting.” The bite in her tone is unmistakable. So different from the polite hostess we encountered moments ago. “He won’t be seeing anyone else right now.”

“Sue Ann, please,” Layla’s mother begs. “This is our sixth time. He’s got to see us.”

“Roy is well aware of Layla’s situation. And he very much wants to help just as soon as the Lord allows. Have faith, Mrs. Rourke.” She turns on her heel and snaps the door shut.

Mrs. Rourke stares feebly at the closed door, then turns a wicked eye on Dean. “Why are you still even here? You got what you wanted.”

“Mom, stop,” Layla orders.

“No, Layla. This is too much.” She sighs and presses her fingers to her temples. “We’ve been to every single service. If Roy would stop choosing these… _strangers_ over you. Strangers who don’t even believe. I just can’t pray any harder.”

“What’s wrong, Layla?” Dean asks.

“I have this…thing,” Layla says tentatively.

“It’s a brain tumor,” Mrs. Rourke says, clearly lacking her daughter’s modesty. “It’s inoperable. In six months, the doctor’s say…” She chokes on tears and her hand covers her mouth. Layla comforts her.

“I’m sorry,” Dean says.

“It’s okay.”

“No, it isn’t,” Mrs. Rourke says, regaining her tenacity. She bores her eyes into Dean and spits, “Why do you deserve to live more than my daughter?”

“That’s enough,” I snap, stepping forward between her and Dean. “Layla, it was nice to see you again. Dean, let’s go.” We walk down the steps, into the mud that will probably never dry, and over to the Impala. Dean looks up sadly at the porch before he gets in the car.

“It’s not fair,” he says on our way back to the motel.

“I know,” I say.

“They’re just playing God.” Dean shakes his head. “It’s sick.”

Maybe it was selfish of Sam and I to bring Dean here to be healed. Now that he’s better, though, it gets harder and harder to find the fault in that. If he were still in Layla’s position, I would probably be cursing the LeGranges like I was cursing God after Dean’s second heart attack.

Back at the motel room, we find Sam at the table working on his laptop. I shrug out of my jacket and toss it on the bed, then sit down next to it.

“What’d you find out?” Dean asks as he takes a seat opposite Sam.

Sam closes the laptop slowly. He keeps his eyes lowered when he meekly says, “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry about what?” Dean says, confused.

“Marshall Hall died at four-seventeen. The clock stopped and everything.”

Dean and I exchange wide-eyed looks. “The exact time you were healed,” I say to him. He nods, stunned.

“Yeah,” Sam agrees. “So, I put together a list of everyone Roy’s healed. Six people over the past three months alone, and I cross-checked them with the local obits. Every time someone was healed, someone else died. And each time, the victim died of the same symptom LeGrange was healing at the time.” He slides a piece of paper across the table.

“Someone’s healed of cancer, someone else dies of cancer,” I say.

Sam nods. “Somehow. LeGrange…he’s trading a life for another.”

“That’s strange,” I say. “He seemed so sincere.” Not like that horrible wife of his.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Dean says, holding up his hands. “So, Marshall Hall died to save me?”

“Dean, the guy probably would’ve died anyway. And someone else would’ve been healed.”

Dean grits his teeth, seething. “You guys never should have brought me here.”

“We were just trying to save your life.”

“But some guy is dead now because of me!”

“Dean, we didn’t know,” I say. “You need to look past thinking you don’t deserve this. What’s done is done. Now we need to figure out what Roy’s up to. Figure out how he’s trading a life for a life.”

“Oh, he’s not doing it. Something is doing it _for_ him.”

“What do you mean?” Sam asks.

“The old man I saw on stage. I didn’t want to believe it, but deep down I knew.” Dean takes the laptop. Opens it. Types for a minute, then spins it around. On the screen is a picture of a hooded figure in a black robe. “There’s only one thing that can give and take life like that. We’re dealing with a reaper.”

“You really think it’s the Grim Reaper?” I ask, sort of skeptical that the head hauncho of death would bother with something like this. “Like, angel of death, collect your soul, the whole deal?”

“No, no, no.” Dean shakes his head. “Not _the_ reaper. _A_ reaper. There’s reaper law in pretty much every culture on earth. It goes by a hundred different names. It’s possible that there’s more than one of them.”

“But you said you saw a dude in a suit,” Sam points out.

“What, you think he should’ve been working the whole black robe thing?” Dean says, looking at the computer screen. “You said it yourself that the clock stopped, right? Reapers stop time. And you can only see them when they’re coming at you, which is why I could see it and you two couldn’t.”

“Maybe,” Sam says quietly.

“There’s nothing else it could be, Sam,” Dean says. “The question is, how is Roy controlling the damn thing?”

An image of the table with all the religious artifacts crosses my mind. I didn’t recognize most of them, but the cross in particular stands out. “There was this cross. I noticed it in the church, but I hadn’t seen it before.”

Sam taps his lip with his finger. “I know what cross you’re talking about. And I’ve seen it. Only not till recently.” He digs through some of the papers on the table and snorts when he produces a card. He holds it up to us. “Here.”

Dean takes the card. “A tarot?”

“It makes sense,” Sam says. “Tarot dates back to the early Christian era, right? When some priests were still using magic? And a few of them veered into the dark stuff. Necromancy and how to push death away. How to cause it.”

“So Roy’s using black magic to bind the reaper,” I say.

“If he is, he’s riding the whirlwind. It’s like putting a dog leash on a great white.”

Dean raises his eyebrows and tosses the card on the table. “Okay, then we stop Roy.”

“How?” Sam and I ask.

He makes a face at us. “You know how.”

“Wait, what the hell are you talking about?” Sam says. “Dean, we can’t kill Roy.”

“Sam, the guy’s playing God,” Dean says, echoing his words from the car. “He’s deciding who lives and who dies. That’s a monster in my book.”

I shake my head. “No.” I continue to shake my head, even after both of them look at me. “No. We’re not going to kill a human being, Dean. We do that and we’re no better than he is.”

Dean stares at me, takes a long breath in though his nose and releases it. “Okay, we can’t kill Roy. We can’t kill death, either. Any bright ideas?” Getting Dean to not kill Roy was as far as I’d gotten. I shrug. He turns to Sam. “College Boy?”

“Okay, uh.” Sam looks around. “If Roy’s using some kind of black spell on the reaper, we’ve got to…figure out what it is. And how to break it.”

“Roy has sermons every Wednesday and Friday,” I say. “Tomorrow we should go back there, see what we can find during the service.” Sam and Dean agree.

That night I’m finally able to sleep, worn out by multiple nights of broken slumber and days of worry and stress. I don’t think Dean sleeps at all. He stays on his back, one arm around me and the other behind his head, and I know he’s thinking about every single little thing that has gone wrong in his life that would justify why he shouldn’t have been healed yesterday.

At three forty-five the following evening, the Impala bounces down the badly potholed road leading to the LeGrange house. If we come down here much more there isn’t going to be much suspension left.

“We better make this good,” Dean says as we get out of the car. “If we don’t find anything today we’ll have to wait until next Wednesday.”

“I was thinking on the way over here, if Roy’s using a spell, there might be a spell book,” Sam says in a low voice.

“See if you can find it,” Dean says. He glances down at his brand new MTM Black Patriot watch that he picked up after he lost his old Smith & Wesson SWAT watch to the shapeshifter. “Hurry up, too. The service starts in fifteen minutes. Harley and I will try to stop Roy.”

Sam glances at me, his brows pulled down over his eyes questioningly. “Wouldn’t the search go faster if there were two of us looking?” Dean’s stony expression makes Sam back off and head for the LeGrange’s house alone.

The same man who was arguing with the Sheriff two days ago stands in front of the tent. “Roy LeGrange is a fraud. He’s no healer.” This time, he hands out leaflets to anyone who will take one. Which is Dean and I.

“Amen, brother,” Dean says in a gravelly voice.

“You keep up the good work,” I add.

“Thank you…” The man looks appalled that we actually agree with him.

Dean and I walk slowly around the perimeter of the tent, our eyes peeled for anything out of the ordinary. Roy and Sue Ann haven’t arrived yet. The stage is bare save for the lectern and table of artifacts, including the odd cross Sam saw on the tarot card last night. My phone rings and a few people stare at me like I’m the most disrespectful person on earth, even though the service hasn’t really started.

“Hey Sam. What have you got?” I gesture Dean ahead and find a quiet corner.

“Roy’s choosing victims he sees as immoral,” Sam says. “The man that died for Dean was an openly gay teacher. The woman before that was an abortion rights advocate. And I think I know who’s next on his list. Remember that protestor?”

“What, the guy in the parking lot?”

“Yeah.” I hear rustling and static over the phone. “Yeah, I’ll find him. But you guys can’t let Roy heal anyone, all right?”

“Okay. Hurry, though. Roy just took the stage.” I hang up and go to Dean. “Sam thinks Roy is sacrificing immoral people to take the place of his righteous believers,” I tell him quietly. Dean rolls his eyes.

After an introduction, Roy steps to the side and holds out his arms. “Layla. Layla Rourke. Come up here, child.”

The crowd bursts into pleased applause. Layla and Mrs. Rourke must have given up on trying to be seen in the front row because Layla stands, stunned, at a bench towards the back. Mrs. Rourke rises to hug her daughter.

“Thank you, mom,” Layla says before breaking the embrace. I wonder what her mother did to get Roy to choose her this time.

“I love you, child,” her mother whispers, then moves to let her out of the row.

“Oh, man,” Dean mutters. Layla passes us and Dean grasps her arm. “Layla, listen to me. You can’t go up there.”

“Why not?” she says, exasperated. “We’ve waited for months!”

“You can’t let Roy heal you,” Dean tells her solemnly.

“I don’t understand. Roy healed you didn’t he? Why can’t you let him try?”

“’Cause if you do, something bad is going to happen. I can’t explain. I just need you to believe me.”

“Layla,” Sue Ann calls eagerly, extending her arm.

“Please,” Dean begs Layla. After glancing from Sue Ann’s hand, to Dean, to me, then to her mother, who wrings her hands nervously and nods, Layla moves to the stage.

“I’m sorry,” she tells us.

“Dear child!” Sue Ann smiles broadly, like a predator over its easy prey, and slinks her arm around Layla’s shoulders, guiding her onstage with the cheering of the crowd. “You deserve this.”

Those three words, from the woman who was so easily dismissive of Layla yesterday, don’t sit well with me. I lean over to Dean. “Something’s not right here. With Sue Ann, I mean. What’s changed? She was so awful to her before.”

“This whole situation’s messed up,” Dean says under his breath.

“I knew the Lord was planning. I knew it was just a matter of time,” Roy says graciously as he takes Layla’s hand.

A light bulb goes off in my head. “Dean, Roy wasn’t there when Sue Ann said those things to Layla and her mother. What if he really believes?”

“Of course he believes. He’s twisted.” Dean, frustrated and clenching his fists, heads to the entrance of the tent.

“That’s not what I mean,” I say, almost inaudibly, because I can’t quite explain why seeing Roy up there on stage, asking people to pray with him, extending his hands to lay them on Layla’s head, doesn’t seem like the wrong thing. It seems…genuine.

“Fire! Hurry, the tent’s on fire!”

I jump unnecessarily. The shout hit me more than the idea of fire. I scan the crowd for Dean, but he’s gone. Disappeared after yelling a false alarm, sending the entire tent into an uproar in a rush to evacuate.

Mrs. Rourke fights her way to the stage, where Roy backs away from Layla. “No!” she cries. “No, please. Please don’t stop. Reverend, please, please!”

Dean emerges in a fold on the side of the tent and beckons to me. I retreat as Roy calls out, “Friends, if you’d all just leave the tent in an orderly fashion, and…we’ll, uh, and we’ll figure out what’s going on and then we’ll come back…”

After pressing buttons on his phone, Dean holds it up to his ear. Waits a moment. “I did it. I stopped Roy.” He looks down at me while listening to Sam, and I watch his face slip into a mask of horror. “It didn’t work,” he tells me before saying to Sam, “Then who the hell is?”

I search around the frantic mess of people fighting their way out of the tent that no one realizes is actually not on fire and find Sue Ann at the very back corner, behind the stage, her head ducked against her chest. I grab Dean’s arm and point to her.

“Sue Ann,” he growls. We shove our way over and Dean spins her around roughly. She drops a wooden cross with a blood-red center – a cross identical to the one on the tarot – that she wears around her neck.

She stares at us in revulsion. Her mouth opens and she screeches, “Help! Help me!”

We back away, Dean nodding knowingly, like we shouldn’t have expected anything better from her. Two cops arrive to escort us out. I take advantage of the fact that they didn’t hold on to me as hard as they did with Dean and slip the cop’s grip. Dean flicks his wrist and his cell phone flies in my direction. I grab it from the air and take off through a side flap in the tent. The call with Sam is still going.

“Sam! Sam!” I yell into the phone until I get his attention. “What’s going on?”

“It’s gone,” he tells me breathlessly.

Sam emerges from between the cars with the hysterical-looking protestor. Our attention is drawn to the entrance as the two cops, followed closely by Sue Ann, manhandle Dean outside.

“I just don’t understand,” Sue Ann says repentantly to Dean, shaking her head. “After everything we’ve done for you. After Roy healed you. I’m just very, very disappointed, Dean.” She then addresses the cops. “You can let him go. I’m not going to press charges. The Lord will deal with him as he sees fit.” Then she turns on her heel and disappears inside the tent with the people who are just barely figuring out there was never any real danger.

“We catch you ’round here again, son, and we’ll put the fear of God in you. Understand?” the taller, more burly of the two cops tells Dean in a passively threatening tone.

Dean just shrugs him off. “Yes, sir. Fear of God. Got it.”

There’s nothing left for us to do here tonight. We ruined a sermon, ruined a woman’s chance to live a long, healthy life. But it would have been at the expense of someone else’s. Yet Dean got to live. I see how he struggles to cope with this. 

As we pass the Reverend and his wife, he says to Layla and her mother, “Private session tonight. No interruptions. I give you my word, I’ll heal your daughter.”

“Thank you, Reverend. God bless you,” Mrs. Rourke praises him.

I find my way to the back seat, thinking about how Roy’s words confirm what I thought earlier. I bring this up to the boys as we drive back to the motel.

“So Roy really believes, then,” Sam says, taking a seat on the bed.

“I don’t think he has any idea what his wife’s doing,” I say, and Dean nods.

“Well, I found this, hidden in their library.” He pulls a tiny black leather-bound book from his pocket. “It’s ancient. Written by a priest who went dark side. There’s a binding spell in here for trapping a reaper.”

“Must be a hell of a spell,” Dean says as he flips through the brittle pages.

“Yeah. You gotta build a black altar with seriously dark stuff,” Sam says. “Bones, human blood. To cross a line like that…and a preacher’s wife? Black magic, murder, evil…”

“She was desperate,” I say, remembering Roy’s story about his cancer and coma. “Her husband was dying, she didn’t have any way to save him.” Sam stares at me, and I know we both think the same thing. About the lengths I was willing to go to save Dean just days ago. “Look, I’m not defending her, all right? I just get it. She was using the binding spell to keep the reaper away from Roy.”

“Cheating death. Literally.” Sam shakes his head.

“Yeah, but Roy’s alive, so why does she still need the spell?” Dean asks.

“To force the reaper to kill people she thinks are immoral,” Sam says.

Dean throws his head back. “May God save us from half the people who think they’re doing God’s work.”

“We’ve got to break that binding spell,” I say.

“Mm-hmm.” Dean tilts his head back down and focuses on the book in his lap. “You know, Sue Ann had a Coptic cross like this.” He shows Sam and I a sketch of a regular cross with the top of it branching into a circle encasing another cross. The same cross that was around Sue Ann’s neck. The same cross that was on the table in the tent.

“The reaper must have backed off when she dropped it,” I say.

“So you think we’ve got to find the cross or destroy the altar?” Sam asks.

“Maybe both,” Dean says, closing the book and setting it on the table. “Whatever we do we better do it soon, or Roy’s going to heal Layla and kill someone else tonight.”

With darkened headlights, the Impala rolls down the same graveled road to the LeGrange’s house well after dark. A tiny, girlish silver car sits at the base of the porch. Dean pulls up behind it.

“That’s Layla’s car,” Sam says. “She’s already here.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, his voice full of remorse.

“Dean,” I say softly.

“You know, if Roy would’ve picked Layla instead of me, she’d be here right now. And if she’s not healed tonight then she’s going to die in a couple of months.” He kills the engine and pockets his keys.

“What’s happening to her is horrible,” I say delicately. “But what can we do? Let somebody else die to save her? You said it yourself, Dean. You can’t play God…” From the desperately powerless look in his eyes, I truly wish I could play God just this once. If I think about it, though, Sam and I already did by bringing Dean here. There was a reason the note ‘Faith Healer’ in John’s journal didn’t have the big giant words ‘Come Here If You’re Dying and Want to Be Saved!!’ next to it. It was a possible case. And we became part of the list of victims this time.

We approach the edge of the tent on silent feet and peek through the closed flap. Roy is inside, at the head of a small group of the faithful, speaking in a hushed, intent voice. Layla and her mother are among them, but Sue Ann is not.

“Gather ’round, please, everyone. Gather ’round,” Roy says, beckoning to his group. “Come in closer, come on up.”

“Where’s Sue Ann?” Dean whispers.

Sam looks around, then mouths, “House.”

Swiftly and quietly, we head back the way we came. Dean stops about halfway and says, “You two go on. Find Sue Ann. I’ll catch up.” He shoves us away.

“What are you gonna…?” I begin, but I don’t finish my sentence. Dean stalks away, disappears behind a few cars, and then his head pops up.

“Hey!” he shouts. He gets the attention of the two cops from earlier. They look over. “You gonna put that fear of God in me?”

The cops drop their coffee and run after Dean, who sprints away in the opposite direction, giving Sam and I a clear shot at the house. We take off and climb the porch. All the windows are black and the door is locked.

“What now?” I say.

Sam leans over the railing on the side of the house and gestures to me. I follow and look out to see a soft light emerging from the cracks of an entrance to the cellar. “Let’s go,” he says, and we hop the railing, landing with a _squelch_ a few feet down in the mud that still hasn’t dried, and slink along the house to the source of the light.

The muted sound of a dog barking echoes around us as Sam reaches down to open one of the wooden cellar doors. He gestures me inside and then follows me down the shallow, creaky steps into the eerily empty cellar.

The only thing occupying the small room is a candlelit altar covered with a long, black cloth. It’s littered with parts of dead animals, blood, religious artifacts. In the very center of the altar, propped up against an animal horn, is a photo of Dean, taken from security footage from our first night in the tent. I only can tell by Dean’s jacket, because his face is smeared out with what looks like blood.

“Dammit!” I gasp as the pieces fall into place. “She’s going to kill Dean next.”

“Of course I am.” Sam and I whip around and find Sue Ann at the cellar doors. “I gave him life and I can take it away.”

With a furious roar, Sam upends the altar, sending the contents crashing to the floor, while I make a run for Sue Ann. For an old lady, she moves fast, and by the time I’ve crossed the cellar she’s made it up the stairs and slams the wooden doors in my face. I hear a beam fall into place over the handles, locking us in. I get up on the steps and push at the doors. They don’t budge. I move up another two steps and try to push with my shoulders.

“Harley, can’t you see?” Sue Ann says over the sounds of my efforts to escape. “The Lord chose me to reward the just and punish the wicked. And your boyfriend is wicked and he deserves to die just as Layla deserves to live. It is God’s will.”

“Oh yeah?” I scream. “Well your husband preaches that _God_ rewards those who are good and punishes the wicked. So why are you still here?”

Sue Ann chokes out a hair-raising cackle. “Goodbye, Harley.”

A loud _crack_ draws my attention. I look up and see Sam with a block of splintered wood in his hands. “Jeeze, Sam, did you just rip that out of the wall?”

“Yeah.” He readjusts his hold on the block and then smashes it through the window. “Let’s get out of here.”

I descend the stairs and head over to him. “All right. You’re totally reinventing the whole ‘Hulk smash’ thing, you know?”

“Shut up,” he says, and heaves me up out of the window.

As soon as we’re on ground level, we look across the lot to see the lights around the cars go out one by one. Then, the sound of Dean’s scream fills the night.

“We need to hurry. Find Sue Ann.”

Sam nods. “Split up.”

I take off into the cars, looking for Sue Ann but end up finding Dean. His head droops, and then his body convulses, sending him to the ground. “Oh, shit,” I mutter, and run over to him. His eyes glaze over and he barely breathes. I don’t touch him because I know the reaper is around. “Hurry, Sam!” I yell to the sky.

I hear the faint, tinkling sound of breaking glass, then Sue Ann’s screech of, “My God, what have you done!” followed by Sam’s darkly menacing, “He’s not _your_ God.” Sue Ann screams just as Dean gasps loudly and his eyes enlarge.

“Hey, hey, Dean,” I croon. I touch his forehead, his cheeks. Run my hand back through his sweaty hair. He looks up at me with scared eyes and grasps onto my hands like vices.

“Don’t…wanna die,” he mutters.

I pull his body to my chest and hold him tight, rocking back and forth gently. “You’re not going to die, Dean,” I whisper softly in his ear, but my voice isn’t that steady.

It takes a few minutes for the two of us to get our composure. The reaper drained most of his energy, but as far as I can tell, he’s still in good condition. No lasting damage. We slowly make our way back to the Impala, where Sam waits.

“You okay?” he asks his brother.

Dean shakes his head. “Hell of a week.”

“Understatement of the year,” I mutter.

Sam offers a half-hearted chuckle. “Come on. We should get going. I’ll drive.”

“What happened with Sue Ann?” I ask when we’re at the motel.

“I broke the cross around her neck. It had blood in it. That was how she was controlling the reaper. As soon as it shattered, she took off screaming. I assume the reaper went after her, because she died right after that.” Sam shrugs, as if it really doesn’t bother him because the old hag deserved it, and heads to the bathroom for a shower.

Dean sits down on our bed, staring out at nothing. “What is it?” I ask him.

“Nothing.”

I take the time to sit down next to him, fold one leg underneath me, and say again, more gently, “What is it, Dean?”

He looks at me with tired eyes. “We did the right thing here, didn’t we?”

“Of course we did.” I try to sound certain even though I’m not.

“It doesn’t feel like it,” he says quietly, hanging his head. I reach out and place my hand on his thigh, and he takes my hand in his. “Must be rough. To believe in something so much and have it disappoint you.” I know he’s thinking of Layla. We basically condemned a sweet, innocent woman to death.

“She wasn’t disappointed by God,” I say. “She was let down by someone who thought they were _better_ than God.”

Dean shrugs offhandedly.

“She still has her faith. It will carry her to her end…and after her end.”

He seems to find some solace, however marginal, in my words. What he doesn’t seem to find is the reason to believe he deserved to live. I can tell him that he deserves it until I’m blue in the face, but that doesn’t mean he’ll believe me. He’ll have to come to that conclusion on his own.

“So…what now?” he asks faintly. The question throws me off. Rarely does Dean not know what to do.

“We…move on. We keep fighting. Same as always.” I lean into his shoulder playfully. “And we’ll do it together. Same as always.” 

Dean turns to me, his green eyes burning with a desire that seems to confuse him. He frowns, like he’s trying to work through very intense thoughts. I smile, a little awkwardly, a little nervously. I’ve never seen this look on his face before.

He reaches out and cups my face in both hands. Pulls me to him and presses his lips against mine. His fingers grip the back of my hair as his kiss deepens with a passionate intensity I quickly match. While his hands move lower, I feel up his chest, caress his face, wrap my arms around his neck. He grabs at my jacket, not in an effort to take it off, but to somehow get our bodies closer, because even as we’re sitting together we can’t get close enough.

Dean breaks away tenderly. For the first time in my life, he whispers, “I love you, Harley.”

There’s nothing in my head or heart now except the words I say next:

“I love you, too, Dean.”


	12. Scarecrow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dude, you fugly. 
> 
> HAHAHA, great line. 
> 
> I had fun with this chapter because Dean and Harley make the perfect sacrificial couple, and now that they've declared their love for each other, there's no more tension or doubts on Harley's side, so they're free to be the crazy duo they are.

“Give me the remote, Dean.”

“No.”

“It’s my turn to pick the show tonight! Give it to me!”

“No!”

“Dean! Give Harley the remote!”

Dean scowls at Sam and tosses the remote on my lap. “I should get to pick what we watch. I just got a second chance at life,” he grumbles.

Sam and I groan.

“God, it’s been _five_ weeks. How many times are you going to pull that card?” Sam asks.

“As many times as it takes to finally work,” Dean admits.

I flip through the channels on the old television in the Motel 6 in Montana. The buttons on the remote are so worn out that occasionally it takes three or four presses just to get the channel to change once. Eventually, I come across late night reruns of _Friends_. “Perfect.” I grin wide.

“Come on, we watched that last week,” Dean complains.

“That’s why they’re called ‘reruns’,” I say. “And you know you like _Friends_. Don’t deny it. Now shush, I like this episode.”

“You like all the episodes.”

“I know.”

Dean wraps his arm around my waist and pulls me to him. I slink down in the bed and snuggle up close. So much has changed in the last month, since Dean, as he put it, got a second chance at life. After the ‘faith healer’ essentially gave Dean a new heart, Dean and I finally declared our love for each other and have hardly wasted a single day proving that physically. It’s driven Sam up the wall. It also drove Sam to open up to another woman.

Two weeks ago I finally got to visit New York. It wasn’t anything like I hoped it would be. We didn’t get to stay and explore the city because after our job there we had to rush over to Greenville, Illinois for another case. Still, what I got to see of upstate New York was beautiful. We posed as posh, upscale New Yorkers in order to infiltrate an auction house and find a haunted painting from 1910 that had been killing people for decades. I got sickly déjà vu to our time in Toledo, Ohio, where Dean and I dealt with Mary Worthington and her mirror. For the week, Sam dated the auction house owner’s daughter, which provided an advantage for Dean and I in the case and in more ways than that for Sam. I was proud of him for moving on.

In Greenville, we found evidence of a zombie. Out of the three of us, the closest we had ever come to a zombie before was watching _Night of the Living Dead_ at Bobby’s house, circa Halloween 1989. We didn’t have to deal with a bunch of carnivorous dead people rising from their graves to walk the earth, though. Just a college girl that had been recently killed in a car accident come back from the dead by way of Greek symbols at the hands of her crush, seeking revenge on those who mistreated her while she was alive. Very horror movie feel, however investigating in early April somewhat alleviated the fear.

Dean’s new heart gave him a sort of new outlook on life. He still goes at every evil monster and spirit with a vengeance, but I find him taking precaution where he was never wary before. A gun instead of a knife under his pillow at night. Not letting me go off alone during a hunt. Actually wearing his seatbelt in the car. I assume it’s only a matter of time before his guardedness wears off.

During a commercial, Dean tilts his head to the side to look over at Sam. “Find anything, Dale Cooper?”

“Not much,” Sam says. “It’s all pretty quiet here. Maybe it was a mistake to head west. Should have went south.”

“What about cross-referencing our dad’s journals for similarities?” I suggest. “Maybe we’ll come across mentions of unsolved cases or something. Find a lead they might have tried to pick up.”

“That’ll be fun,” Dean says. “I love the guy, but Dad writes like friggin’ Yoda. Won’t be able to find much unless we’ve got the Force.”

“Maybe we should call the Feds. File a Missing Persons. It’s been long enough,” Sam says.

Dean rolls his eyes. “We’ve been over this. You know how pissed he’d be if we put the Feds on his tail?”

“Yeah, I guess…” Sam taps his lip and closes his laptop. Sets it on the nightstand. “I’ll check more in the morning.” He looks over at the TV, where the commercial just ended. “What episode is this?”

“Um, ‘The One Where Everybody Finds Out’.” I giggle. “Now I see why they named all their episodes like that.”

“That’s great, but I don’t know what it is they find out.”

“Oh, that Chandler and Monica are dating.”

After the show is over, we go to bed. Dean falls right off, but I’m in such a good mood that it takes a little more effort. Twenty minutes later I finally doze off, listening to Dean’s soft snoring and Sam’s even breathing.

I don’t know what time it is when I hear Deep Purple’s _Smoke On The Water_. It’s low, crackly, definitely not coming out of a radio. I groan and roll over. Realize it’s Dean’s phone. He got a new one after the old one was confiscated during his arrest in Jericho and finally figured out how to put a song as a ringtone.

The phone continues to ring. Dean snores away. The phone is on the nightstand on the other side of him, and I’m too tired to bother to get it. I’ll let it ring out.

“Dean.” Sam’s gravelly voice is barely perceptible across the room. I grunt to let him know I’m awake but Dean is not. He groans and the bed springs squeak as he rolls over. The song stops. “Hello?” The springs give a quick squeal. He must have sat up quickly. “Dad? Are you hurt?”

Did I hear that right? He said Dad? “Dean, get up,” I say, shoving his arm. He snorts loudly and opens his eyes.

“We’ve been looking everywhere. We didn’t know where you were, if you were okay.” Sam looks down at his feet. “We’re fine. Dad, where are you?”

Dean finally jerks awake and sits up, sending the blankets to the floor. “Is that Dad?” he says as he turns on the light.

“What? Why not?” Sam’s face is stern, angry. “You’re after it aren’t you? The demon that killed Mom.”

“The demon? What’s he saying?” Dean demands. He holds out his hand for the phone.

“You know where it is?” Sam turns away, ignoring Dean. “Let us help.”

“Give me the phone,” Dean orders.

Sam shakes his head. “Why not?” He shakes off Dean again. “Names? What names? Dad, talk to me. Tell me what’s going on!”

Dean goes across the room and pulls on a t-shirt. I watch him, thinking about what this all means. John made contact. He found the demon. He doesn’t want our help. I handed him the Colt and then he just cut me off. Would it be different if my dad were still alive? Would John be avoiding him, too? I used to think I knew John because my dad did, because John was such a big part of our lives. Apparently that was a one-way street.

It’s annoying to think that all that searching we did was for nothing, because John couldn’t pick up the damn phone sooner. A small part of me wonders if John somehow sensed us speculating about calling the Feds last night.

“No! No way!” Sam says, his voice rising.

“Give me the phone,” Dean hisses, striding across the room. He snatches the phone from Sam and sits down on the bed with such force I bounce a little. “Dad, it’s me. Where are you?”

I look over at Sam. He broods, frustrated, looking so lost. What did John say to him? Beside me, Dean’s demeanor totally changes. He instantly transforms from confused son into submitting soldier.

“Yes, sir. Uh, yeah, I got a pen.” He leans over to the nightstand and grabs the motel pen and pad. “What are their names?” I look at what he writes down. Holly and Vince Parker. Mike and Norma Sawyer. Sarah and Gabriel Collins. “Okay, Dad.” He closes the phone. “The hell is wrong with you, Sam?”

“That was the first time we heard from Dad in person, Dean. Why the hell wouldn’t we try to find out where he is? Try to go help him?”

“Because _this_ is what he wanted to tell us.” Dean holds up the pad. “Not his location.”

Sam, fuming, shakes his head and turns his back to get into bed.

It’s a miracle the three of us manage to get any sleep. I’m allowed to be a little more relaxed than the boys because after all, it’s not my dad. But I care for them, so in turn I care for John. I’m just tired of the crap he pulls. Dean was right. John never wanted to be found, and the phone call in the middle of the night proves that. Now we can stop looking. We can take a step back. Hunt. Be ourselves.

Our new destination is a small town in Indiana by the name of Burkitsville. Non-morning-person Dean bounds out of bed five minutes before the alarm goes off and gathers his things with a newfound purpose and loads them into the Impala. He may not have found his dad, but hearing from him was enough to lift his spirits. It wasn’t enough for Sam though. He’s more sluggish, taking his time to get ready and pack.

I go over to him. “Sam?” He just shakes his head. I walk away. He doesn’t want to be bothered right now. He doesn’t even fight me for the front seat.

We spend the entire day on the road. It’s dark when I pull out the motel notepad and look at the names Dean wrote down, and the cities they lived in that he added after he ended the call with John. I decide to go over the information again with him. “All right, so, the names John gave us, they’re all couples?”

“Three different couples. All went missing.”

“And they’re all from different towns? Different states?”

“That’s right. You got Washington, New York, Colorado.” Dean ticks them off on his fingers as he lists them. “Each couple took a road trip cross-country. None of them arrived at their destination, and none of them were ever heard from again.”

“Well, it’s a big country, Dean. They could’ve just disappeared.”

I meet Dean’s eyes and then we both look back at Sam. He’s sprawled out on the back seat, not giving a care in the world, unless it’s to discredit John’s information. Dean returns his focus to the road.

“Yeah, could’ve. But each one’s route took them to the same part of Indiana. Always on the third week of April. One year after another after another.”

“This is the third week of April,” I say. I know this off the top of my head because I had just thought how I was supposed to get my period last week. I drew a tiny calendar in the back of my dad’s journal and over the last year alone those tiny red dots have never coincided once. Not that I’d ever have to worry about anything.

Dean and I save a lot of money on condoms since the doctors told me I would never be able to have kids when I was a teenager. Abdominal pains led to a diagnosis of an abnormal reproductive system. Two and a half years of continuous unprotected sex with Dean and that has proven true. “So, your dad is sending us to Indiana to go hunting for something before another couple vanishes?”

“Yahtzee.” He takes on a tone of admiration. “Can you imagine putting together a pattern like this? All the different obits Dad had to go through? The man’s a master.”

“Pull the car over,” Sam suddenly orders.

Dean looks at the rearview mirror. “What?”

“We’re not going to Indiana. Pull the car over.”

At Dean’s confused glance, I shrug, and he drives off the highway and parks in the dirt. “We’re not going to Indiana?” he repeats, twisting around in his seat.

“No. We’re going to California. Dad called from a payphone. Sacramento area code.”

“Sam,” I say gently.

“Harley, if this demon killed my mom and Jessica, and Dad’s closing in, we’ve gotta be there! We’ve got to help!”

“Dad doesn’t want our help,” Dean says.

Sam scoffs. “I don’t care.”

“He’s given us an order.”

“I don’t care,” Sam says again, more firmly. “We don’t always have to do what he says.”

Instead of yelling, _Shut up, you idiots!_ like I so desperately want to, I pull my legs up to my chest and rest my head on my knees. Flashbacks of those awful hallucinations in the Asylum, specifically the one where Sam and Dean fought over a situation very similar to this, cloud my brain. I press my palms into my eyeballs until the pain makes the visions subside.

“Sam, Dad is asking us to work jobs, to save lives.” Dean runs his hands through his hair. “It’s important.”

“I understand, believe me, I understand. But I’m talking one week here, man, to get answers. To get revenge.”

“All right. Look, I know how you feel, but–”

“Do you?” Sam snaps, and Dean looks positively shocked at Sam’s tone. “How old were you when Mom died? Four? Jess died _six_ months ago. How the hell would you know how I feel?”

Dean grinds his teeth together, the muscles in his jaw and neck straining. “Dad said it wasn’t safe. For any of us. He obviously knows something that we don’t, so if he says to stay away, we stay away.”

“I don’t understand the blind faith you have in the man,” Sam says. “I mean, it’s like you don’t even question him.”

“Yeah, it’s called being a good son!”

Sam reaches over the seat and grabs the keys from the ignition, then throws open his door and storms out of the car. Dean and I follow. Sam opens the trunk and unloads his bags.

“You’re a selfish bastard, you know that?” Dean says through gritted teeth. “You just do whatever you want. Don’t care what anybody thinks.”

“I’m selfish? Is that what you really think?”

“Yes, yes it is.”

Sam laughs and slams the trunk shut. “Did Dad even ask how you were doing? His cell was still in service. I’m sure he got my voicemails last month. Knew you were sick. Knows you’re alive. He knew you were dying and he couldn’t even pick up the phone!”

“I’m sure he had his reasons,” Dean says uncertainly.

Sam shakes his head. “You’re unbelievable. If I’m such a selfish bastard, then this selfish bastard is going to California.” He slings his backpack over his shoulder and walks down the road, back the way we came.

“It’s the middle of the night!” Dean calls. “Hey, I’m taking off. I will leave your ass here, you hear me?”

Sam stops walking and turns around. “That’s what I want you to do!”

“All right, that’s enough!” I shout. “I’m done listening to you two fight over and over again. It’s like the only fucking record you guys know how to play. I’m sick of it! Dean, get your ass back in the car. I need to talk to Sam.” Dean opens his mouth. I hold up my hand. “Now.”

With a final begrudging look, Dean goes back to the car and slams the door. I walk over to Sam, where he stands fuming a few yards away.

“Come on, you’re not serious about leaving,” I say gently.

He looks straight ahead when he speaks, completely over my head since he’s a whole foot taller. “I _am_ serious.”

“You left before and you ended up coming back.” I touch his arm, give it a squeeze until he looks down at me. “Save yourself the trip. Just stay.”

“Maybe I won’t come back this time. I’m going to California. Maybe I’ll stay out there. After I find Dad and the demon, I’ll go back to school. Fix the mess I got myself into by missing that interview. It’s not too late to get back to my life.”

“Sam…” I shouldn’t stop him. I can’t stop him. “Dean was right. It’s the middle of the night. At least let us take you to a bus station or something.”

He turns his head pointedly to a series of lights about a mile back. A restaurant. Gas station. Bus stop. He planned this. “I need to go.”

I nod. “All right, then. Goodbye, Sam.”

“Goodbye.”

No hug. No wave. He just turns his back and makes his way down the road alone. I watch him disappear into a shadow and then resume my seat in the car.

“You let him go?” Dean snaps at me.

“I can’t make him stay,” I say tiredly. “Just drive.”

Dean stares angrily out of the windshield for a few moments before starting the engine and driving off into the night.

I must have fallen asleep. When I wake up we’re parked on the side of the road in a sleepy town and Dean stares at his open cell phone. After my eyes adjust to the light I notice Sam’s name highlighted on the contact list. Dean shakes his head and closes the phone, then jumps a little when he sees me staring at him.

“Oh, you’re awake.”

“Just woke up. Are we here?”

“Yup. Welcome to Burkitsville.”

“Sounds like a bad movie.” I yawn and rub the sleep from my eyes. We get out of the car and cross the street. Walk up the steps to a long porch connecting multiple businesses. Outside one of them is a man, wearing jeans and a worn out plaid shirt. He sits in one of two chairs in front of a window painted with a bright _Scotty’s Caf_ _é_ , one booted foot resting on his other knee.

Dean gestures to the window. “Let me guess.” He points to the man. “Scotty.”

The man looks up at the window, then at us. “Yep.”

“Hi, my name’s John Bonham.”

“Isn’t that the drummer for Led Zeppelin?” Scotty asks gruffly.

“Wow,” Dean says, taken aback. “Good. Classic rock fan.”

I roll my eyes. The man’s in his fifties. Lives in a small town. Sure as hell he’s gonna be a classic rock fan. “I’m Jennifer.”

“Bonham?” Scotty asks sarcastically. I don’t respond. He looks over at Dean. “What can I do for you, John?”

Dean takes out two folded pieces of paper from his pocket. Printouts of Missing Persons fliers for Holly and Vince Parker that I found yesterday morning. He smooths them out and hands them to Scotty. “I was wondering if, uh, you’d seen these people by chance?”

Without taking them, Scotty glances at the fliers. “Nope. Who are they?”

“Friends of ours. They went missing about a year ago. They passed through somewhere around here and I’ve already asked around Scottsburg and Salem–”

“Sorry,” Scotty says, cutting Dean off. “We don’t get many strangers around here.”

Dean nods, then grins. “Scotty, you’ve got a smile that lights up a room. Anybody ever tell you that?” Scotty, who has not changed his facial expression from a dead stare, narrows his eyes. Dean chuckles. “Never mind. See you around.”

We continue on down the lonely street and come across Jorgeson’s General Store. It’s very old fashioned inside; the only thing that’s probably changed since the 1800’s is the merchandise. We introduce ourselves to the elderly shop owners, and thankfully we keep up the ruse of John and Jennifer Bonham because the man’s name is Harley. I ask them the same questions Dean asked Scotty, and just like Scotty, they deny ever seeing the couple.

“You sure they didn’t stop for gas or something?” I persist.

Harley looks again at the printouts. Shows his wife, Stacy. She shakes her head. “Nope, don’t remember ’em,” Harley says, handing back the papers. “You said they were friends of yours?”

“That’s right.”

A young woman comes down the back stairs carrying a box. She shakes her head to get the strands of blond hair that fell out of her ponytail off of her face. When she sets the box on the counter I see her gold necklace spells out _Emily_.

“Did the guy have a tattoo?” Emily asks us.

“Yes, he did,” I say.

She holds her hand out for the picture of Vince. She examines the tribal tattoo on Vince’s arm, clearly visible in the flier. Emily looks over at Stacy and Harley. “You remember? They were just married.”

Harley nods, putting on a fake air of recollection that rubs me the wrong way. “You’re right. They did stop for gas. Weren’t here more than ten minutes.”

“Do you remember anything else?” I ask him.

“I told ’em how to get back to the Interstate. They left town.”

“Could you point us in that same direction?” Dean asks.

“Sure,” Harley says, all too helpful now. “Take Laskey straight out of town.”

“And then you’re going to turn right on Orchard Road,” Stacey adds. The couple follows us out of their shop and watches happily, arm in arm, as we make our way back to the car.

“That wasn’t odd at all,” I say when we’re on the road.

“Yeah, something’s up.”

“Did your dad say anything specific about the town?”

“No. Just that couples were vanishing from this place. There’s nothing in the journal either. What about your dad? Any mention of Burkitsville?”

“No. I read through it twice yesterday. Nothing.”

We cruise down a two-lane highway bordered by apple orchards. The lush green leaves fly by. I notice the farther away from Burkitsville we get, the more brown the leaves turn, as if they’re slowly dying.

“What the hell? You hear that?” Dean asks me. He turns the radio lower, which reveals a faint warbling from the back seat. He can’t reach while driving, so I turn around and dig into the bag on the floor. As soon as I uncover the EMF reader, it beeps and flashes frantically.

“That’s too high of a reading to be a mistake,” I say. “It’s definitely picking up something.”

Dean pulls the car to the side of the road and parks under an apple tree. We get out and roam through the orchard, under the trees planted in neat lines, past the wooden ladders and barrels partially filled with apples, and bales of hay next to tree trunks. The deeper we get, the more the EMF warbles.

In a tiny clearing is a wooden post. On that post is a scarecrow that seriously lives up to its name, from the sickle in its hand to the way its face is stitched into a menacingly eerie guise. I stay back, not liking it at all, but Dean bravely walks forward with a scowl on his face.

“Dude, you fugly,” he tells the scarecrow. “Harley, check this out.”

“What?” I ask from my safe distance.

Dean points to the scarecrow’s arm. “Look familiar?”

“Um…yes?” I venture carefully.

“Are you scared?” he scoffs. “Of a _scarecrow?_ Come on, man, you’re tougher than that.”

“It’s creepy! And there’s something off about it.”

“Duh.” He points to the arm and asks again, “ _Look_ _familiar?_ ” I shrug my shoulders. He rolls his eyes, grabs a nearby ladder and plants it right next to the scarecrow. He climbs a few rungs, then takes out Vince’s Missing Person’s flier from his pocket. “Nice tattoo,” he mutters.

My curiosity gets the better of me and I take a closer look. Branded into the scarecrow’s arm in a manner that looks like charred flesh is a pattern similar to the tribal tattoo on Vince’s arm.

“I wouldn’t have pegged old Edgar Allen Crow here for a tat man,” I say.

“‘Edgar Allen Crow’?” Dean barks out a sarcastic laugh. “That’s so weak.”

“You got any better ideas, Einstein?”

Dean thinks for a moment. “Russel Crowe.”

“There’s _no_ way that’s better than Edgar Allen Crow. It’s not even a play on words, it’s just the dude’s name.”

“That’s what makes it genius.”

“No, that’s what makes it lame. Anyway, we need to find out more about this town if that’s really Vince in there.”

Dean retreats from the ladder, muttering, “Russel Crowe,” under his breath and then chuckling to himself.

We drive back to Burkitsville. Park in front of an auto shop/gas station mash-up with two pumps. Emily, the girl from the General Store, comes outside. I find this odd until I take a closer look at the buildings and realize we’re behind the General Store. The Jorgeson’s must own all these establishments.

“You’re back,” Emily says.

“Never left,” Dean responds.

“Still looking for your friends?”

Dean nods. “You mind filling her up there, Emily?”

The girl smiles and removes the gas cap from the back of the car. Starts filling the tank.

“So, you grew up here?” I ask her.

“I came here when I was thirteen. I lost my parents. Car accident.” She smiles, oddly. “My aunt and uncle took me in.”

“They’re nice people,” I say, but I’m just fishing.

“Everybody’s nice here.”

“So what, it’s the, uh, perfect little town?” Dean says.

“Well, you know, it’s the boonies. But I love it. I mean, the towns around us, people are losing their homes, their farms. But here, it’s almost like we’re blessed.”

I turn to Dean, think of the leaves on the trees on the way out of town. How the farther we get from this perfect little town, the more things seem to be dying. Dean raises his eyebrows, questioning my look.

“Have you ever been out to the orchard?” I ask Emily. “Seen that scarecrow?”

Emily smiles uncomfortably. “Yeah, it creeps me out.”

“Aw, come on. Good ol’ Russel Crowe?” Dean chuckles. “Who does he belong to?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s just always been there.”

“That your aunt and uncle’s?” I nod toward an old maroon SUV under an awning next to the auto shop.

“Customer. Had some car troubles.”

“It’s not a couple, is it?” I ask suddenly, earning me an peculiar look from Dean.

Emily nods. Smiles. “Yes.”

I shoot Dean a concerned look just as the pump clicks for a full tank. Emily replaces the pump and watches as we drive off. I don’t let Dean go far, though.

“Park over there,” I tell him, pointing to some trees.

“What’s going on?”

“Okay, look. Couples are disappearing. Yearly. This town is the only common factor. Surrounding towns are failing while this town prospers. There’s a creepy-ass scarecrow in an orchard where the trees only thrive near said prosperous town. Doesn’t it all seem pretty ritualistic to you?”

Dean’s brows pull together. “What, like some Pagan-god-sacrificial type thing?”

I shrug. “Maybe. The town won’t kill its own. It needs strangers. That’s why it takes the couples. And so far, the only couples in the area are me and you, and the one with car trouble. What seems like the better choice, here?”

“Car trouble,” Dean says. “Let’s go find them.”

We finally find the young couple at a table in Scotty’s Café. Scotty himself crosses the otherwise empty room to bring the couple dessert.

“We’re famous for our apples,” Scotty tells them. “So, you gotta try this pie.”

“Oh, no,” the girl says, blushing at the offer. “No, thank you.”

“It’s on the house,” Scotty insists.

“Thank you,” the guy says.

Dean waves from the front door. “Oh, hey, Scotty. Can I get a coffee, black?” He turns to me. “Want anything?”

“No.”

“Just a coffee.” Dean and I sit at a table one away from the couple, who are now absolutely enjoying their dessert. Dean eyes them enviously. “Some of that pie, too, while you’re at it,” he calls over his shoulder. Then he flashes a smile at the couple. “How ya doing? Just passing through?”

The girl, who had just taken a bite, chews hastily and swallows. “Road trip.”

“Hmm. Yeah, us too.”

Scotty returns with a pitcher of cider and refills the couple’s glasses. “I’m sure these people want to eat in peace.”

“Just a little friendly conversation,” I say. My stomach growls. As far as pie goes apple is top choice, but for some reason it’s the farthest from appetizing right now. With the ideas that were running through my head earlier in the car, I can’t help but think of Sweeney Todd.

When Scotty goes back behind the counter after servicing the couple yet again, Dean says, “Oh, and that coffee, too, man.” Scotty shoots him an agitated look and disappears behind the swinging door.

“So, what brings you to town?” I ask the couple.

“We just stopped for gas,” the girl says. “The guy at the gas station saved our lives.”

“Is that right?” Dean says in false wonder.

The guy nods. “Yeah, one of our brake lines was leaking. We had no idea. He’s going to fix it for us.”

“Nice people,” I say timidly.

“So, how long ’till you’re up and running?” Dean asks.

“Sundown.”

I frown. “Really? To fix a brake line?” It’s barely noon. I’m no car expert, but over the past few years I’ve watched Dean maintain the Impala. He’s a pretty decent mechanic. And I helped him replace the brakes and bleed the lines one time. Mainly handed him tools and pressed the brake pedal when needed, but still, I was there. Took us an hour and a half, tops.

Dean picks up on my suspicions. “I know a thing or two about cars. I could probably have you up and running in about an hour. I wouldn’t charge you anything.”

“Um, thank you, but I think we’d rather have a mechanic do it,” the girl says politely.

Dean sits back in his chair, mentally shuffling through the cards he wants to play. “Sure, I know. It’s just…these roads. They’re not real safe at night.”

The couple exchanges a worried look. “I’m sorry?”

“I know it sounds strange, but, uh, you might be in danger…”

“Look, we’re trying to eat, okay?” the guy says, growing annoyed. Dean didn’t exactly pick the best card. The smell of the apples and cider and the thought of dead bodies baked into pies is making me sick. We should probably just leave.

Dean backs off just as the bell above the café door jingles. Enter the sheriff. Scotty emerges from the back room. “Thanks for coming, Sheriff.”

I look nervously at Dean, who at this point is just frustrated as he watches Scotty and the sheriff whisper together, then look at us. We break the glance immediately, but the sheriff still comes over.

“I’d like a word, please,” he says in a gruff voice.

“Come on, I’m having a bad day already,” Dean complains.

“You know what would make it worse?”

Dean and I nod slowly, because yes, we know what would make it worse. Getting hauled off to hick town jail with no one to come to our rescue. The sheriff essentially gives us an ultimatum and tails us as we drive out of town to make sure we actually leave. Dean grumbles under his breath the entire time until we’re far enough away, deep in the dead trees, that the sheriff finally turns around and drives back to Burkitsville.

And that is what _we_ plan to do as soon as night falls. With the only habitable town in the area now gunning for us, we have no place to eat or stay. It’s not like we haven’t lived out of the Impala before. We’re just trying to bring down the only habitable town in the area. While we wait for nightfall we skirt the edges of the orchard and gather fallen apples. Scotty was right. Even out here, where they’re pretty much decaying or picked apart by animals and bugs, they’re still pretty good. And not being in pie form makes them much more appetizing to me.

I sit stretched out in the back seat. Dean sits the same way in the front, facing me. We slowly work our way through the edible apples and toss the cores in an empty basket we stole. For music, Dean specifically selects REO Speedwagon, his special Extended Versions cassette that came out a few years ago *****. When the tape finishes, he rewinds it to the beginning and _Don’t Let Him Go_ plays again. He really wants to skip forward to our song, _Can’t Fight This Feeling_ , which is kind of spot-on for our situation, but I veto the decision. All he’ll do is sing the ballad in an extremely sexy voice to get me all hot and fussy, and soon we’ll be naked in the back seat. No, we need to stay focused.

“All right, my turn,” Dean says. He bites off a hunk of apple and chews while he thinks. “Um, okay. Would you rather gank a nest of vampires by yourself or fuck a werewolf?”

I consider this. “Is the werewolf in human form still?” 

“Yeah, but his transformation starts while you’re in bed.”

I laugh. “The werewolf, of course.” Dean looks appalled, with the apple halfway to his open mouth. “Sorry. I love you and all, but I’ll take killing one monster after a bad one-night-stand over bloodsucking vampires any day.”

Dean shrugs. “Your turn.”

I toss my apple core in the basket and carefully select another while I think of a question. I take the new apple in my hands, turn it over and over, twist off the stem while counting how many times it takes to break off, like I used to do as a kid. The stems are so brittle from sitting out in the sun all day, they usually break off around four times.

“Okay, would you rather–”

But Dean never gets to choose what he would rather do. Headlights flood the Impala and we turn to the back window to see a car roll to a stop about a hundred yards behind us. The headlights fade and I just barely hear the faint sound of car doors opening and closing. Then voices.

“I can’t believe it! We just got the car fixed!”

“Come on, this way.”

“That’s the couple from town,” I say.

“They should have just let me fix their car,” Dean grumbles. “Come on, let’s go get them.” He takes the key out of the ignition, killing the battery and the radio.

“Okay, but we need to be careful about how we approach them. I think you kind of scared them back in the café.”

“Yeah? Well they’re about to be way more scared by what’s out there.”

We get out of the car, silently close the doors. Take a couple of guns packed with rock salt from the trunk. Move stealthily through the orchard. We come across the couple wandering towards the clearing, where the fugly scarecrow lives. Dean points to me and then points behind me. I nod and take off. While he goes to the right, I’ll circle around.

Shotgun in hand, I move through the trees, my eyes peeled for any signs of movement in the dark. If it weren’t for the almost full moon, there wouldn’t be any source of light out here.

I find the scarecrow’s perch before I find the couple. My stomach lurches and I taste apple and bile in my throat when I see that the scarecrow is no longer tied to its post. I can’t call Dean to warn him – there’s no cell reception. I grip the gun tighter and continue the arc I’m supposed to make.

Finally, I hear other signs of life. It’s the girl. “Steve?”

Leaves rustle, like a snake slithering across the ground. Too fast for a frightened couple taking scared steps through the orchard. Too loud to be Dean, who could walk across broken glass to stalk prey without making a sound. It can only be one thing. I ready my gun.

“Who’s there?” Steve calls out, trying to hide the fear in his voice.

The girl gives out a small scream. I know they didn’t see me, I’m still too far away. I take off running, turn the corner around a large tree with twisting roots protruding from the ground. I reach another clearing. Ahead of me is the couple, running away from a brown, shadowy figure speeding at them with the agility that If-I-Only-Had-A-Brain shouldn’t have. I slow down and cock my gun, but Dean leaps into my line of fire, yelling at the couple, “Get back to your car!” The couple takes off in the opposite direction. Dean raises his gun and shoots the scarecrow square in the chest. It only stumbles and continues on its path.

Dean looks up and sees me with my gun ready. He jumps to the side and I fire twice at the scarecrow, but again, it just keeps going for Dean. He yells to me, “Go! Go!” and I run parallel to him through the trees, toward the car.

I hear his gun cock right after mine. I look around, but the scarecrow isn’t following us anymore. Dean veers to the left and meets me in the trees. We slow to a walk and find the couple hunkered down by a hole in a large trunk, sweating and panting.

“Where did it go?” Dean asks me in a hushed voice.

“I didn’t see it leave. Maybe we finally wounded it?”

“What – what was that?” Steve asks cautiously.

Dean wipes sweat from his brow with his sleeve. “Don’t ask.”

I walk over to the girl and offer her my hand to help her up. “Come on, let’s get you guys out of here. What’s your name?”

“Megan. This is Steve.”

“Harley. Dean.”

Dean nods. “Let’s go.”

We manage to make it back to the Impala in one piece. Their car is done for. Who knows what the friendly neighborhood psychopaths did to it. There’s no way of finding out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. We give them a lift to the next city. They can have a tow truck come get it later today. We offer them apples, but they’re too shaken up to eat.

Following Highway 65 north leads us to Scottsburg. Since Steve and Megan managed to sleep on the drive, they want to find a business that can get their car for them so they can get back on the road. We leave them at an auto shop and find a motel. I stayed awake during the trip only because Dean hasn’t slept in two days and I know he must be dead tired. We get a room and fall into bed and sleep until dark. Then we get dinner, shower, and go right back to sleep.

I wake up to the sound of Dean’s voice. He’s propped up in bed, talking on the phone while his free hand caresses my hair. I freak out for half a second when I hear Sam’s voice on the other end, but then I actually listen. They’re having a decent conversation.

“ _The scarecrow climbed off its cross_?”

“Yeah. I’m telling you, Burkitsville, Indiana. Fun town.” Dean notices I’m awake and rolls his eyes. I smile.

“ _Something must be animating it. A spirit_.”

“No, it’s more than a spirit. Harley thinks it’s some sort of ritual sacrifice. Maybe a god. A Pagan god, anyway.”

“ _Why does she think that_?”

“The annual cycle of its killings, and the fact that the victims are always a man and a woman. Like some kind of fertility right.”

“ _You two need to be careful when you head back there, then_.”

“Yeah, that’s what she said, too. Don’t worry. I don’t think the locals like us very much. But you should see them, though. The way they treated this couple. Fattening them up like a Christmas turkey. They’d never waste free food on us.”

“ _The last meal. Given to sacrificial victims_.”

“Yeah.”

“ _So, a god possesses the scarecrow_ …”

“And the scarecrow takes its sacrifice. And for another year, the crops won’t wilt and disease won’t spread.”

“ _Do you know which god you’re dealing with_?”

“No, not yet.”

“ _Well, you figure out what it is, you can figure out a way to kill it_.”

“I know. We’re going to head to a local community college today. Talk to a professor. You know, since I don’t have my trusty sidekick geek boy to do all the research.”

“ _You know I doubt that, since you’ve got Harley, but if you’re hinting you need my help, just ask_.”

“I’m not hinting anything. Actually, uh – I want you to know…I mean, don’t think…” Dean fumbles on his apology and I think it’s adorable.

“ _Yeah, I’m sorry, too_.”

“Sam.” Dean sighs. “You were right. You gotta do your own thing. You gotta live your own life.”

Even though Sam’s voice is subdued by the phone, I hear the shock. “ _Are you serious_?”

“You’ve always known what you want. And you go after it. You stand up to Dad. And you always have. Hell, I wish…” He looks down at me sadly. “Anyway. I admire that about you. I’m proud of you, Sammy.”

“ _I don’t even know what to say_.”

“Say you’ll take care of yourself.”

“ _I will_.”

“Call me when you find Dad.”

“ _Okay. Bye, Dean_.”

Dean hangs up the phone and tosses it on the nightstand, then rests his head back against the headboard.

“That was a good thing you did,” I tell him softly.

“Yeah,” he whispers.

“Are you all right?”

He nods. I reach up to kiss him on the lips, and he catches me by the back of the head and pulls me to him.

This time is one of my favorites. We’ve had our variety of sexual pleasures, all of them great. I love our slow, passionate ones, though. Like now. Nothing rough or fast. Just slow, easy pleasure, completely enveloped by every small movement and touch.

After we clean up and dress, we head over to Ivy Tech Community College. Dean made an appointment with a Professor Lindley, a sociology teacher. The only one willing to talk to us. We meet at his office and he welcomes us inside.

“You said on the phone you were interested in local lore?” Professor Lindley says when we’re seated at his desk. His thick mustache wiggles when he talks. He unbuttons his blazer, revealing a black shirt covering a big beer belly.

“Yeah. Call it a hobby,” Dean says.

“It’s not every day I get a research question on Pagan ideology. I’m afraid Indiana isn’t really known for its Pagan worship.”

“What if it was imported?” I ask. “You know, like the pilgrims brought their religion over. Wasn’t this area settled by immigrants?”

Professor Lindley sticks out his lip. “Well, yeah.”

“Like that town near here, Burkitsville. Where are their ancestors from?” Dean asks.

“Uh, northern Europe, I believe. Scandinavia.”

“What could you tell us about those Pagan gods?”

“Well, there are hundreds of Norse gods and goddesses,” Professor Lindley says as he pulls on the edge of his mustache.

“We’re actually looking for just one,” I say. “Might live in an orchard.”

“Wood god, hmm? Well, let’s see.” Professor Lindley rises from his chair and crosses the tiny office to a series of shelves that dominate the room. After browsing titles, he pulls out a large, leather-bound book and sets it on the desk. Dean and I stand up and watch him leaf through some pages. I stop him when I notice an ancient, hand-drawn picture of a raggedy man bound to a post surrounded by farmers in a field.

“Wait, what’s that one?”

“Oh, that’s not a woods god, per se,” Professor Lindley says.

Dean squints down at the tiny writing. “The V-Vanir?” he says. The professor nods. He reads the passage. “‘ _The Vanir were Norse gods of protection and prosperity, keeping the local settlements safe from harm. Some villages built effigies of the Vanir in their fields. Other villages practiced human sacrifice. One male, and one female._ ’” He points at the raggedy man. “Kind of looks like a scarecrow, huh?”

“I suppose,” Professor Lindley says.

I browse the script where Dean left off. “This particular Vanir is energy sprung from a sacred tree?”

“Well, Pagans believed all sorts of things were infused with magic,” the professor explains.

“So what would happen if the sacred tree was torched? You think it’d kill the god?” Dean asks eagerly.

The professor lets out a hearty laugh. “Son, these are just legends we’re discussing.”

“Oh, of course,” Dean says, putting on a fake smile. “Yeah, you’re right. Listen, thank you very much.” He holds out his hand.

Professor Lindley shakes it. “Glad I could help.” He turns to me, shakes my hand as well, and Dean and I head out. When Dean opens the office door, he runs right into the Sheriff, bearing a raised rifle. He slams the butt into Dean’s head before Dean has time to react. He falls to the floor, unconscious, a trail of blood forming above his brow.

Half a moment later I yell out and take a swing at the Sheriff, but he grabs my wrists and wrenches it behind my back. I watch in horror as he and Professor Lindley exchange knowing glances, and that’s when it dawns on me: the professor was in on this the entire time.

The Sheriff cuffs me and drags me out a back door to his car. After locking me inside, he returns for Dean, and it takes both the sheriff and Professor Lindley to heave his huge body now tied with ropes into the back seat. I scream and threaten them and kick the back of the seats the entire time we drive. The two men just sit there, staring out of the windshield, completely oblivious to a screaming girl thrashing around behind them. They must have years of practice standing by and watching horrors unfold before them, though.

It’s dark when we reach Burkitsville. Dean is still unconscious. I try to nudge him awake before we pull up in front of Jorgeson’s General Store. If both of us were alert, I could get him out of his ropes and he could definitely undo the cuffs, and we’d be able to fight our way out. Or at least make a run for it. Instead, we’re dragged to the basement of the General Store and locked in.

I stay close to the lifeless lump that is Dean, since the sheriff just tossed him on the ground in an ungraceful heap. I hear muffled voices of a conversation going on overhead.

“You don’t understand, Harley. All of us here – it’s our responsibility to protect the town.” That’s not the sheriff. The voice is too low, gravelly. It must be Scotty.

“I understand,” Harley says. “Better than all of you do. I’m the one that gives ’em directions. I’m the one that sends ’em down to the orchard.”

“Harley, please.” Scotty’s voice is tired, annoyed.

“We all close our doors. Look the other way. Pretend we can’t hear the screams–”

“It’s angry with us.” A woman’s voice. Stacy. “Already the trees are beginning to die. Tonight’s the seventh night of the cycle. Our last chance. It’s now or never.”

“That’s it. We’re getting out of here,” I grumble. I took the bobby pins out of my hair this morning and decided to braid it instead, and of course a hair tie won’t undo handcuffs. Instead I shove Dean’s shoulder with my foot until he opens his eyes with a groan.

“Where are we?”

“Basement of the General Store. Waiting to be sacrificed.”

“Well, that sounds classier than ‘killed’, doesn’t it?” He sits up and shifts around. “Is there a way out of here?”

“No. I looked around already. No windows. The only way out is the door, and it’s locked.”

Dean wiggles his eyebrows. “That’s never stopped us before.”

The lock clicks and the door swings open. Dean and I look up to find Harley, Stacy, Emily, Scotty, and the sheriff all looming in the doorway.

“It’s time,” Stacy says calmly. The men descend the stairs and Dean and I have to allow ourselves to be dragged back outside, but only because we’re tied up and because Stacy looks pretty damn menacing with a shotgun that I’m pretty sure isn’t loaded with rock salt. We all make a bumpy trip to the orchard in an old pickup truck.

Not only are we taken to the orchard, we’re led to the clearing with the scarecrow on his post. I keep my eyes locked with it in an angry glare as the sheriff undoes my handcuffs and ties me to a tree. To my right, Harley and Scotty tie up Dean in a similar fashion.

“How many people have you killed, huh?” Dean spits at them. “How much blood is on your hands?”

“We don’t kill them,” the sheriff says.

“No, but you sure cover up after,” I say. “I mean, how many cars have you hidden, clothes have you buried?” The sheriff looks at me with a murderous glower that I take to mean if he didn’t need me for the sacrifice, he’d kill me on the spot.

Stacy, still with her shotgun, paces slowly in front of Dean and I. “Try to understand. It’s our responsibility. And there’s just no other choice. There’s nobody else but you.”

“You know, I could tell you the names of about ten different towns in Indiana alone that get along just fine without sacrificing innocent passersby,” I snap at her.

She laughs at me. “But this is our home. And it’s what we do.” She flicks the end of my braid over my shoulder with the barrel of the gun. “The town needs to be safe. The good of the many outweighs the good of the one.”

And with that, the five of them walk away, including Emily, who I thought was actually one of the good ones. She doesn’t even offer up an apologetic glance. Just stares at the ground as she follows her aunt and uncle. Coward.

“I hope your apple pie is fucking worth it!” Dean shouts.

“Got a plan?” I ask when sound of the truck engine fades in the distance.

“I’m working on it,” he grumbles.

We stay there in silence. There’s not much to do. I keep my angry scowl with the scarecrow and he just stares back. I fumble around with the ropes but the sheriff sure knows how to tie a knot. Not like the demon’s half-assed bonds.

After what seems like hours, I say, “So, there’s got to be a sacred tree around here or something. If this is where the scarecrow is, it makes sense that the tree would be nearby.”

“One thing at a time, Harley. Let’s focus on getting out first.”

“How’s that working for you, Houdini?” I look over at Dean struggling against his binds. He raises his head and narrows his eyes. “Well, what do you have in mind?” I say dully.

“It helps to carry a knife.”

Dean and I look around the orchard wildly. I scan the trees for the sound of the voice, because I thought I heard Sam, but it couldn’t be him. He’s miles way, traveling to California.

A figure emerges from the shadows of the trees, barely rustling the leaves. My heart kicks up a fast beat, but there’s no need. Out comes giant Sam, wearing a smug grin and wielding a pocketknife.

“Oh!” Dean exclaims, immediately overjoyed at the sight of his brother. “Oh, I take back everything I said. I’m so happy to see you! Get over here and untie me.” Sam laughs gently and cuts the ropes around Dean’s wrists. “How’d you get here?”

“I, uh…I stole a car,” Sam admits sheepishly.

Dean lets out an enthused whoop. “That’s my boy! And keep an eye on that scarecrow. He could come alive at any moment.”

“What scarecrow?”

The boys look over at the post. My eyes slowly follow, fear bubbling inside me mainly because I’m still a sitting duck tied to a tree, and find it empty. “Sam, get me the hell out of these ropes,” I say through gritted teeth.

“Good to see you too,” he says as he slices away.

“Told you you’d be back,” I whisper. He makes a face. “What made you change your mind?”

“I spent three hours this morning trying to call you and Dean. When I kept getting your guys’ voicemail I figured something might be wrong.”

“Right you were.” I rub my wrists. “Let’s go.”

We take off through the trees. After a few yards, Sam says, “All right, now, this sacred tree you mentioned–”

“It’s the source of its power,” I say.

“So let’s find it and burn it,” Sam says determinedly.

“Nah, in the morning,” Dean says, panting from the jog. “Let’s just shag ass before Leather Face shows up.”

“Hey, that’s a good one,” I comment.

“I know, right?”

“Doesn’t top Edgar Allen Crow, though.”

“Will you two focus?” Sam snaps.

We reach another clearing, similar to the scarecrows’ but lacking the post. Instead we come across the elders that brought us to the orchard, Emily, and a handful of other townspeople that we’ve never seen before. We turn to book it in the opposite direction and find our path blocked by more angry townspeople slowly forming a circle to barricade us in. Harley and Stacy step forward, he with the shotgun this time, and she shining a flashlight in our faces.

“Let us go,” I demand.

“It will be over quickly. I promise,” Harley says. The way he brandishes the shotgun leaves little room for us to move. “You have to let him take you. You have to–”

Out of nowhere, a long, curved metal spike spears Harley’s back and lodges out of his chest. Stacy screams as the scarecrow materializes behind them. It yanks out the sickle from Harley’s torso and he falls to the ground. Stacy tries to dart away but the scarecrow catches her by the throat, hooks the sickle in Harley’s ankle, and drags them off into the shadows of the orchard. The townspeople scatter in fright, and we take a leaf out of their book and scram as well.

We don’t stop running until we’ve reached an ugly green car on the side of the road. I figure that’s the one Sam stole. We stand by the car, panting, and listen to the fainting sounds of screams and wind blowing through the trees.

“Well, then,” Dean says. Sam raises his eyebrows, and I hang my head.

After all that, our job still isn’t done. I very much want to be finished with Burkitsville, Indiana and never set foot within a hundred miles of the place ever again. But we still have a Pagan god to kill, a sacred tree to burn, and no supplies to do so. The Impala is in the college parking lot in Scottsburg, and Sam doesn’t have anything on him that we could use to burn the tree. So we spend the night driving to Scottsburg to fill up a can of gasoline and make our way back to Burkitsville by morning.

I am basically independent of my feet as we walk through the orchard in the brisk dawn. My head keeps falling forward as I nod off, occasionally swaying into Sam or Dean. Dean took my suggestion about the sacred tree being somewhere close to the scarecrow, so we start at the post, to which he has eerily returned, and search from there.

I will firmly stand by my belief that the only reason we find the tree at all is because strange scorch marks in the bark that creepily resemble the burns on the scarecrow’s arms are directly eye level to Sam, nearly halfway up the trunk, and he happened to notice it as we walked by.

Dean and I stand back as Sam dumps the can of gasoline around the trunk, and then Dean ignites the end of a long branch with a lighter and tosses it at the base of the tree. We watch as hot fumes rich with the stench of petrol lick the old wood and steadily grow into a raging inferno that oddly, despite the gasoline, is contained around the tree. Magic of the Pagan god, I guess.

“The whole town is going to die,” I say quietly.

“And the rest of the townspeople? They’ll just get away with it?” Sam says.

Dean shrugs. “What’ll happen to the town will have to be punishment enough.”

For the last time, we make our way out of the orchard and back to the road. The Impala waits, gloriously black and shining in the early morning light. I want it to take me to the nearest motel so I can sleep for a week.

“So, can we drop you off somewhere?” Dean asks Sam before we get in the car.

The edge of Sam’s lips pull up into a tiny smile. “No, I think you’re stuck with me.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“I didn’t…I still want to find Dad. And you’re still a pain in the ass.” Dean nods knowingly. “But…Jess and Mom…they’re both gone. Dad is God knows where. You and me and Harley–” Sam wraps his arm around my shoulders and gives me a light squeeze. “We’re all that’s left. So, if we’re going to see this through, we’re going to do it together.” I hug Sam back and smile at Dean.

Dean is speechless, caught in a moment of sweet sentiment. He holds his hands out to his brother. “Hold me, Sam. That was beautiful.” Sam swats his hands away and we all laugh.

“You two should be kissing my ass. You were dead meat,” Sam says.

Dean puffs out his chest. “Yeah, right. I had a plan. We’d have gotten out.”

“Right,” Sam and I say together.

Dean walks around to the driver’s side. I turn to Sam in anticipation of our routine spat for the front seat, but he just holds the passenger’s side door open for me and then gets in the back.

“You know, my life was so simple,” Sam says as he leans forward between Dean and I. “Just school, exams, papers on polycentric culture norms.”

I scrunch up my face, horrified by the sentence he just uttered. “Well, I guess we saved you from a boring existence, then.”

“Pagan gods, tree burning, sacrificial villagers…” Sam shrugs. “Occasionally I miss boring.”

“Yeah, right, Sammy. You know you’d never give up this life,” Dean says. “Boring is so… _boring_. We’re out here living!”

“You were almost eaten by a scarecrow in an orchard,” Sam says wanly.

“Like I said, living.” Dean starts the engine with a chuckle and drives off down the road.

“By the way,” I say, “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m never eating apples again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *The REO Speedwagon Extended Versions album came out in 2001, which makes sense because it's 2006 in the story, but it was a CD, not a cassette tape. I mean, there's a chance it was put on cassettes, but who knows. It was 2001. Bear with me lol.


	13. Nightmare

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A trip down memory lane. The Force. Baseball museums. Priests and little boys. Darts. Fortune tellers and spoon benders. The Hangover: Supernatural Edition. Oh, and good ol' murder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You've arrived at the point in my fic where the remaining stories will be tied to the main plot, not side gigs hunting monsters. I mean, maybe I'll have some monster hunting in there, but I'm so goddamn sick of season 1 I just want to kill John, write the hospital scene (important shit happens to Harley), zoom forward to Sam and the Wild Wild West Town From Hell, and bring in Cas. 
> 
> It's not my intention to make Dean so sappy, either. I've deleted a lot. He loves Harley, but he's still macho Dean, you know?
> 
> This is the chapter that is closer to 78% mine, and I had fun with it. I needed Max and the lead into that whole demon thing. Again, if you've read this far, thank you for sticking with it, and there will be more to come :)

At my request, we leave Indiana immediately on the shortest path out of the state. Dean drives south down Highway 65 until we reach Louisville, Kentucky, the first city we come across outside of Indiana. It’s just after noon when we find a motel. Sam calls for Chinese take-out while Dean and I take a nap on our bed, and he wakes us up when the food arrives. We all eat slowly, mechanically, barely speaking.

It seems like we’ve fallen into a sort of rut or pattern. It started in Copper Harbor. Things were going great with Dean, then we fought, and then I was kidnapped. Dean saved me, and subsequently everything was all right again. Then the shapeshifter incident happened, and I questioned my relationship with Dean, leading me to make the decision to leave him. Of course, that couldn’t last long, and when I returned Dean’s life was at stake and fighting seemed arbitrary. Now we’re closer than ever.

The same thing is happening with Sam. The first time he fought with Dean and left, it was just boredom that made him come back. This time, Dean and I were in trouble, and Sam came to our rescue. It’s becoming evident that we are inseparable, caught in a loop of fights and liberation.

Since I must have gotten enough sleep during our nap and then for the four hours before I woke up to pee, my body won’t let me fall back asleep. Sweat builds around my neck and lower back. It’s hot in the room. The A/C must have turned off. I get up, turn it back on. The sheets are damp so I just sit in the chair at the table. Outside, in front of the room, the Impala glistens in the moonlight.

When Sam and Dean were in Kansas, they found a small chest of old family photos and a few memorable knickknacks in the basement of their old house. It’s been inside the trunk since that day – for some reason neither of them want to look through it but they can’t stand the idea of not having it. I glanced inside one time when I was packing our stuff in the car. I didn’t see much.

Maybe I’ll go look through that chest now. I can’t sleep anyway.

I dig Dean’s keys out of his leather jacket pocket, which slipped from the chair to the floor sometime during the night, and then place the jacket gently over the back of the chair. Dean loves that jacket; his dad gave it to him as sort of a congratulatory gift after killing his first monster by himself. My dad, John, Dean and I had gone out in search of a yenaldooshi in New Mexico. The Navajo regions, to be specific. Dean and I were fourteen. I remember laughing at the name of the monster immediately upon hearing it, which was clue enough that I probably wasn’t ready to hunt on my own. Not the way Dean was. He had been ready for years.

The chest sits in the same corner of the trunk it’s been in since it got there. I pull it to the side. It’s a little rusted, some water damage from living in the basement for twenty-some years. I flip the lock, push back the lid, and feel a wave of sadness rush over me. Not for Sam and Dean. Selfishly. Because here, I can hold what’s left of the broken Winchester family: photos, an old baseball, some army men, a tiny box of jewelry I bet belonged to Mary, and some other odds and ends.

I have next to nothing left of my family besides my dad’s weapons and journal, and the Camaro. Not one single picture, not even his old hunting jacket. I left it on his body when I salted and burned it after he died. It was soaked in blood. We had a house once, a home. I destroyed that, though. After I killed my brother and my mom slit her wrists, my dad sold the house and we hit the road.

Sometimes, rarely, I wonder, if I hadn’t dropped the gun that day and my family was still together, what would have become of me? Then I remember what Dad said to me as he sat there bleeding out, tied to a tree. I was always destined to be a hunter. Dad was, and his mother before him. It goes back generations. It’s in our blood. But my mom would have offered me a choice. She would have told me I could be anything I wanted to be. Now, looking back, I can’t imagine my life any different.

That trip to New Mexico was our last trip together before I stopped seeing the Winchester boys for nearly ten years. It was more of a learning experience for me and a test for Dean. We were there for backup; Dean was supposed to track the yenaldooshi down and kill it himself. It was originally proposed by our dads that we work as a team, Dean and I, but Dean was completely against it. He wanted to work on his own. Prove himself.

My heart catches in my throat as I flip through the handful of photos. Mostly ones of the family, some of just Mary and John, all the way back to their wedding day. Some with just Dean and Sam. One in particular I’ve never seen before. As I think back, I barely remember taking it, barely remember asking one of the waitresses at the diner to take it. But it’s there. At a table littered with food that we gratefully ate after days in the desert is John and Dean, sitting on one side together, and John is actually smiling. On the other side is my dad with his arm around me, beaming. We are all red with sunburn but oddly happy.

Tears well in my eyes. I flip the photo over. Someone wrote a date: November 12, 1993. That doesn’t make sense. The Winchesters left their house in 1983. How did a picture from ten years later get in the mix? I set the photo of the four of us aside and flip through the rest of them quickly, turn over random photos as the boys get progressively older. I can’t believe the sight of Sam older than six months didn’t throw me off before. The newest picture in the pile is one of Sam and Dean in 1996. There’s two copies. I take one for myself, tuck it in my pocket with the other one, and then scoff in disbelief. Either Sam kept pictures with him and put them in the chest after they found it, or John kept going back to that house for trips down memory lane, to add to the pot. I don’t even try to think about how that would be possible. I’m done wasting brain power on John.

The motel door creaks open and I jump. The photos escape my hands in a flurry. I curse and bend down to pick them up, careful not to scratch them.

“Harley?” Dean calls quietly.

“Down here.”

I receive another heart attack when he appears silently by my side.

“I woke up and you weren’t in the room.”

“Were you worried?” I ask him.

“Let’s say mildly concerned. What are you doing?” Dean leans down and picks up the last picture on the ground. Turns it over. Of course, it has to be one with Mary in it.

“I’m sorry–” I say quickly. He just shakes his head. Sits down right there on the black tar and stares at his mom and dad after they were married. Mary is pregnant, and since Dean’s not around I’ll bet that’s him in her belly. He holds his hand out silently for the other pictures, and I give them to him.

“Wow,” he whispers as he flips through them. Then he frowns, picking up on the discrepancy it took me a lot longer to figure out. “Did he go back?”

I shrug my shoulders and sit down next to him. We lean against the Impala. “I don’t know. The pictures are different. Very well taken care of. If they’d have been stuck in the journal or in a book in the trunk all those years I doubt they would be in such good condition.”

He thinks for a minute. “Sam?”

“Maybe. But he couldn’t have had this one. Look.” I show him the picture of us in New Mexico, and he smiles.

“No way.” The moment of joy doesn’t last, though, as he realizes if Sam didn’t have this picture, John did. And somehow it ended up back at their old house. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” I say again. I gesture to the picture. “Do you mind if I keep this? That’s the only picture I have of my dad.”

“Sure.” He hands it back.

“I kept this one too,” I admit, and show him the one of him and Sam.

“Now you’re pushing it,” he says mockingly.

“There’s another one in there.”

“I know, I saw it. I’m just messing.” He cranes his neck back to peer inside the trunk. “What else is there?”

“Just some…toys and stuff. A box of your mom’s jewelry.”

“Did you take from that too?” he jokes, but I don’t find it very funny.

“I wouldn’t do that,” I say sternly.

“Hey, calm down. I was kidding.” He looks down at his right hand, where he wears his mom’s silver wedding band on his ring finger, and spins it around. Then, he gets to his knees and digs around in the chest until he finds the small jewelry box. He sits back down and opens it. There isn’t much in there. A pair of earrings, a necklace, a few rings. One of them is an engagement ring. Dean picks it up.

“My mom only took her rings off to wash dishes and shower,” he says quietly. I wouldn’t have this–” he holds up his right hand “–if she hadn’t showered that night. After she showered, she liked to sit by her bed and rub lotion on her hands. She always had soft hands…” He stares at the engagement ring for a long moment. “She must have forgotten to put them back on when she fell asleep.” He sets the ring back in the box.

I wonder what happened to my mom’s wedding rings. There’s lots of things I don’t know about my family, and the information died with my dad. We used to live in West Virginia. I’ve never been back there, ever. Not even to visit my mom and my brother’s grave. My dad was killed somewhere in the wilderness near Manning, Colorado. There will never be vising that site again.

“Harley.”

Dean’s voice pulls me back to the present. He holds a thin silver chain around his fingers, displaying the twisted knot pendant of tiny diamonds. Very dainty, very beautiful. Something that my lumberjack self, full of un-girlish charm with broad shoulders and no waistline and long hair that hasn’t been cut or styled since I was nine could never wear.

“I want you to have it,” he says softly. When he starts to undo the clasp, I gently rest my hand on his.

“I can’t take that.”

“I’m giving it to you,” he persists.

“It was your mom’s.”

“I know….that’s why I want you to have it.” He manages to get the tiny clasp undone and holds the necklace out to me. “Please.”

I sigh. “Okay.” I pull my hair to the side and twist it above my head. Dean reaches out and hooks the necklace together. Thankfully, out of all the things I’m not blessed with, I actually have a thin neck. The chain falls low and the pendant rests right above my breastbone. He runs his hands down the chain, hovers over the knot of diamonds, and then pulls his hand back.

“I love it,” I tell him truthfully. “It’s beautiful.”

“It looks awesome against that holey Led Zeppelin t-shirt,” he says with a smile.

I look down and run my finger along the hole in the shirt near my belly button. All my clothes seem to have holes or are in danger of falling apart they’ve been worn so much.

“Thank you,” I whisper.

“Ready to go in?” he asks. I nod. He helps me pack up the chest and tuck it safely in the corner of the trunk. Then we go inside and get into bed.

Despite high spirits, slumber is uneasy. I toss and turn, wavering on the brink of unconsciousness until the sound of the motel door creaking open and snapping shut rouses me permanently.

“Morning, sunshine!” Sam announces obnoxiously. I open one eye and see him appear around the corner, laden with coffee and a bag of pastries. Good. I’m starving.

“What time is it?” Dean groans.

“Uh, it’s about five forty-five.” Sam hands me a coffee when I cross the room. I poke through the bag of pastries and emerge with a cheese Danish.

“In the _morning?_ ” Dean whines.

“Yep.”

“Where does the day go?” Dean says with mock pensive. He sits up in bed and stretches his arms. “Did you get any sleep last night?”

“No,” I grumble, and Sam says nonchalantly, “Yeah, I grabbed a couple hours.”

“Liar.” Dean holds his hand out expectantly. I put his coffee in it, then sit down at the table and dig into my Danish. Sam takes the seat across from me.

“When was the last time you got a good night’s sleep?” I ask him.

“I don’t know. A little while, I guess.” Sam shrugs. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Yeah, it is,” I say, and Dean nods in agreement.

“Look, I appreciate your guys’ concern–”

“Oh, we’re not concerned about you–” Dean makes a face after scalding his tongue on the coffee “–it’s your job to keep our asses alive, so we need you sharp.”

When Sam stays silent, I ask softly, “Are you still having nightmares about Jess?”

Sam grips his coffee so tight I’m afraid he’ll crush the foam cup. “Yeah, but it’s not just her. It’s everything. I just forgot, you know? This job…man, it gets to you.”

“You can’t let it,” Dean says. “You can’t bring it home like that.”

“You’re never afraid?” Sam asks. He looks at me keenly, but I can’t answer. Truth is, yes, sometimes I’m afraid. I hadn’t been afraid before. My dad raised me to be strong. Then I lost him. Since then, I gained Dean and almost lost him, too. It’s crossed my mind that loving Dean could be making me weak, but I’d never let the boys onto my suspicions.

So I just mutter, “No,” and Sam turns his attention on Dean.

“No, not really,” Dean answers quickly.

Sam scoffs and gets to his feet. He crosses the space to our bed in two strides, reaches under Dean’s pillow and unearths a Ruger 9mm. He brandishes it in Dean’s face as evidence against his previous statement.

Dean snatches the gun back. “That’s not fear. That is _precaution_.”

“All right, whatever,” Sam says wearily. “I’m too tired to argue.”

“Should have tried sleeping,” Dean grumbles.

“So now that we’re up, what are we gonna do?” I ask.

“I vote go back to sleep,” Dean says.

I tip the last morsel of my Danish towards Dean. “Noted. But seriously. Where do we go next?”

Silence. I don’t want to be the first to break it, or the first to ask about John. Sam was hell-bent on going to California just days ago. Has he changed his mind? If so, we have no direction to head, no leads to any cases.

“Let’s….go to the Louisville Slugger Museum,” Sam suggests out of the blue.

“Okay, random,” Dean says.

“Why not?” I say. “Could be fun. We could use some fun.”

“It’s settled, then. Baseball museum it is.” Sam gets up and heads for the bathroom. “I’m gonna shower. You guys get up and get ready.”

“Uh, Sammy.” I point to the clock on the nightstand, where the numbers change to 6-0-0. “I don’t think they open for a couple hours.”

Sam chuckles. “Right.” He still goes into the bathroom and starts the shower.

“I’m going back to bed.” Dean flops onto his stomach and pulls the covers over his head. I lay down, but I’m beyond sleep.

A baseball museum? It’s so casual, so normal. So not us.

I can’t wait.

We’re the first ones in line at eight in the morning. First and only ones. Sam’s happy, though, and I wouldn’t trade that for the world. Underneath Dean’s grumpy, sleep-deprived demeanor is a kid who’s just as excited as his brother. I’ve never been much of a sports person, but the chance to do something as low-key as going to a museum (one that’s not haunted) feels like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

The boys geek out over baseball history facts and the demonstration of making the bats. I’m pretty wowed myself. It’s nice to learn about something from our past knowing we won’t have to go out and kill it afterward.

Six – I’m not kidding, _six_ – hours later, we emerge from the factory. The bright sunlight pierces my eyeballs, all the way to the back of my skull. I groan and cover my eyes.

“Well, I think I’ve learned enough about baseball bats to last a lifetime,” I say when we’re in the car. “I’m _starving_. You think they’d have food if they were gonna keep you trapped in there all day.”

“Trapped? You looked like you were enjoying yourself,” Sam says.

I shrug. “It was all right.”

Sam reaches back to yank the gift bag off my wrist and pulls out its contents. “Seems like it was more than all right for you to buy _two_ mini-bats.”

“They’re collector’s items.” I take my spoils back. “Get bent, Sam.”

“Hey now, let’s focus on the important part of this conversation,” Dean says. “Harley was right. They didn’t have any food in there. Let’s find some place to eat.”

“A bar,” I say. “We need to play darts again. I can’t believe you beat me last time.”

Dean chuckles maliciously. “I know. Even _I_ was surprised. What’s the score now?”

I dig out my dad’s journal from a backpack, flip to the last page. I count the tally marks quickly. “One hundred and three to twenty five, my favor.” Dean groans.

“You guys need to get a life,” Sam says.

“That’s over two years, though,” I point out.

“Don’t listen to him, Harley,” Dean says. “He’s just jealous because he sucks at darts.”

Sam makes a face. “I am not. And I do not!”

“We’ll see,” I say smugly.

When we leave the bar around ten, my score with Dean is 109 to 26. My new score with Sam is a neat 1 to 1. I might have my work cut out for me now.

Such an eventful day must have worn Sam out because he’s out like a light ten minutes after we reach the motel. Dean tries to feel me up under the covers, but something about Sam’s snores just kills the mood. We regretfully go to sleep sans workout.

I wake up to a shaking mattress. I refuse to open my eyes since it’s bright behind my lids. Sun or lamp, I can’t say.

“Dean, wake up.”

The mattress stops shaking. Something falls on the bed, then a zipper unzips.

“Harley, you too.”

I smash my face into the pillow before reluctantly looking around the room. It’s definitely not the sun lighting up the room.

Dean groans and props himself up on his elbow. “What are you doing, man?” He rubs his face and peers at the clock. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“We have to go,” Sam says.

After staring sleepily at Sam this entire time, my brain finally comprehends his actions. He’s packing. All fatigue basically evaporates from my body. I share a glance with Dean, who raises an inquisitive eyebrow.

“What’s going on, Sam?” I ask. I’m awake, alert, but not alarmed, because I have a feeling I know what this is about.

“We have to go,” Sam says again, more urgently. “Right now.” He grabs his bag and leaves the room.

“Wait – Sam!” Dean gives a frustrated groan as he gets out of bed. “What do you think’s up with him?” he asks me as he pulls on a pair of jeans.

“I think Sam saw something,” I say quietly. Not another word is spoken until we’ve gathered our things and followed Sam into the Impala.

Dean inserts the key in the ignition and turns it over. “Where are we headed?”

“Illinois.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Not yet.” Sam pops open the glove box and digs around. He looks back up at Dean’s hand hovering over the gear lever. “Drive!” Dean pulls the lever down and heads to the highway.

“Sam, calm down.” I reach over the seat and put my hand on his shoulder. He tenses up but doesn’t shrug me off. “What did you see?”

“Not now.” He flips open his phone and dials the operator, who connects him to Illinois State PD as requested. “Hi, yeah, Macready. Detective Macready. Badge number one-five-eight. I’ve got a signal four-eighty in progress, I need the registered owner of a two door sedan, Illinois license plate Mary-Frank-six-zero-three-seven. Yeah, okay, just hurry.”

“Sammy, relax,” Dean says. “I’m sure it’s just a nightmare.”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” Sam says off-handedly.

“I mean it. You know, a normal, everyday, naked-in-class nightmare. This license plate, it won’t check out. You’ll see.”

“I don’t know, Dean,” I say. “Sam saw the woman in your old house, and that turned out to be real.”

“This felt different,” Sam says. “Like the dream of the house, and Jessica.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Dean says. “You’re dreaming about _our_ house, _your_ girlfriend. This guy in your dream, you ever seen him before?”

“No.”

“No. Exactly. Why would you have premonitions about some random dude in Illinois?”

Sam turns to stare out of his window. “I don’t know,” he admits reluctantly. Then, into the phone, he says, “Yes, I’m here.” He listens, then glares at Dean. He snatches a pen from the seat and writes. “Jim Miller. Charleston, Illinois. You have a street address? Got it. Thanks.”

“Checks out,” I say. Like I figured it would.

“How far are we?” Sam asks Dean.

“From Charleston?” Dean thinks for a moment. “Couple of hours.”

“Drive faster.”

Dean and I make eye contact through the rearview mirror before he steps harder on the gas pedal. The Impala roars and speeds forward.

“Do you want to tell us what you saw now?” I ask Sam.

“I saw a guy dying.” Sam grinds his teeth. “He pulled his car into a garage. The door shut. Then the car locks engaged and the engine started. He was trapped. He…suffocated.”

I don’t know what to say. Sam ignored his dreams of Jessica, and then she died. He followed his heart, despite Dean’s judgement, about Kansas, and saved a family. He’d definitely want to tip the scales toward being right the third time around.

We drive the rest of the way in complete silence, save for the REO Speedwagon tape that’s been stuck in the cassette player since Burkitsville. Kevin Cronin serenades us during the dark, lonely journey to Charleston.

Dawn hasn’t broken, but the darkness isn’t quite so black when the Impala cruises to a stop on a residential street. The crowd of people surrounding emergency vehicles isn’t a good sign. My stomach drops at the sight of a body bag on a stretcher in the driveway.

“Crap,” Sam mutters.

“It’s not your fault, Sam,” I say.

We get out and approach the bystanders. Dean asks one woman what happened.

“Suicide,” she replies, shaking her head. “I can’t believe it.”

“Did you know them?” I ask.

“Saw him every Sunday at St. Augustine’s. He always seems…” She clutches her chest in a somber way. “ _…seemed_ , so normal. I guess you never know what’s going on behind closed doors.”

“Guess not,” Dean mutters.

“How did…uh.” Sam’s words catch in his throat. “How are they saying it happened?”

“I heard they found him in the garage, locked inside his car with the engine running.”

Goosebumps break out on my arms. Sam’s visions are just a little bit eerie, a little too accurate, to be natural.

“Do you know about what time they found him?” Sam asks.

Forlorn, the woman says, “It just happened about an hour ago. His poor family. I can’t even imagine what they’re going through.”

She nods to said family on the front porch. The woman cries into the shoulder of a man, and a distraught young guy stands behind them, staring out at nothing. Sam walks away, back toward the Impala. Dean and I follow.

“Sam, we got here as fast as we could,” I tell him.

“Not fast enough. I doesn’t make any sense. Why would I even have these premonitions if there wasn’t a chance I could stop them from happening?”

“I don’t know,” I say quietly. Dean shrugs his shoulders.

“What do you think killed him?” Sam asks.

“Maybe the guy just killed himself?” Dean rubs the back of his neck as he weighs his next words. “Maybe there’s nothing supernatural going on at all.”

Sam shakes his head. “I’m telling you, I watched it happen. He was murdered by something. I watched it trap him in the garage.”

Dean opens his mouth. In the smallest of gestures, I hold up a finger. He stops.

“What was it?” I prompt Sam gently. “A spirit? Poltergeist?”

“I don’t know what it was,” Sam says agitatedly. “I don’t know why I’m having these dreams. I don’t know what the hell is happening!”

I press my fingers against my eyes and then drag them down my face. I’m so at a loss right now. Typically, we try to _kill_ the supernatural creature. We never question _why_ the creature is doing something and then try to save it. I look up. Dean stares at Sam for a long moment.

“What?” Sam says defensively.

“Nothing,” Dean says hastily. “I’m just…I’m worried about you, man.”

“Well, don’t look at me like that!”

Dean quickly looks away. “I’m not looking at you like anything.” He glances back at Sam. “Though, I gotta say, you do look like crap.”

“Nice, thanks,” Sam mutters.

“Okay, white flag’s waving,” I interject. “Let’s pick this up later today. We’ll check out the house, talk to the family.”

“You saw them, Harley, they’re devastated,” Sam says. “They won’t want to talk to us.”

“Maybe not _us_ ,” Dean says with a mischievous grin. “I think I know who they _will_ talk to.”

“Who?” Sam and I both ask with a heavy tone of impatience.

Dean chuckles as he saunters to the trunk of the Impala. He opens it, props it open with a shotgun, then disappears behind it. He emerges with a Roman collar.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Sam groans.

“What?” Dean asks innocently. “You heard the lady. They were church people. We’re strangers, they wouldn’t let us in. But who doesn’t trust a priest?”

“Little boys,” I say. 

Dean lets out one hard laugh and Sam pinches the bridge of his nose in embarrassment.

“It’s true,” I grumble. “But what would I wear? We don’t have nun robes or anything.”

“Nun robes?” Sam repeats with a scoff. “They wear habits, not robes.”

I sneer at the know-it-all.

“I think you should sit this one out, Harley,” Dean says. “Two’s company, but three’s a crowd.”

“You know, Jack, Janet and Chrissy would beg to differ,” I say with a frown.

Sam shakes his head. “You guys watch way too much television.”

We spend the morning searching for a motel room, breakfast and coffee. Since I’ve been voted out of our newest escapade, I kick back on the bed flipping through channels while Sam and Dean dress in their man-habits. As they tie their shoes and adjust their collars and slick back their hair, I think they look like teenage boys getting ready for their first dance.

“Don’t you guys look cute,” I tease.

Sam shamefully regards himself in the mirror. “This has got to be a whole new low for us.”

Dean smirks at his brother, then waves to me. “See ya later. Keep the bed warm.”

I roll my eyes as they leave.

What will I do with my free time?

Nothing holds my interest on TV, so I shut it off. I press my lips together and push air through them until I make a squealing sound. Hmm, it’s quiet.

I reach over to the alarm clock radio and turn it on, revealing loud mariachi music. With an eye roll, I turn the volume down and swing the number dial until I find a radio station playing something acceptable. Carrie Underwood? Next. The Pussycat Dolls? Ew. Ah, finally. Something _classic_. Immediately I jump into the song.

_“All I want to do in the middle of the evening is hold you tiiight…Rosanna! Rosanna!”_

Dean never lets me listen to Toto. Or New Order, Eddie Money, David Bowie, a Flock of Seagulls. Or Morrissey, or The Smiths (sometimes it’s hard for me to tell which is which). I’m pretty sure he only let me listen to Fleetwood Mac before because my dad had just died. Well, one day, we’ll be driving my Camaro instead of the Impala, and then _I_ will be the awesome driver and _Dean_ will have to shut his shot-gunning cakehole!

I get up from the bed and decide I should sort through our clothes. It’s been a while since we’ve had a laundry day. I hum along to the song as I dump out the contents of our bags on the bed. Going through the boys’ dirty clothes doesn’t bother me, but I _refuse_ to sniff them, since Dean insists that’s the only real way to determine if they’re wearable or not.

_“Meet you all the way!”_ I sing, nodding along. _“Ro-sa-ann-aa, yeah!”_

By the end of the song I’ve got a decent pile of dirty clothes. When _Rocket Man_ starts, I hum along and fold up the clean clothes. I wonder if the motel has a laundry room on site, or if we’ll have to find a coin wash somewhere else.

Laundry days make me wish I had my own washing machine. Any time we eat, I wish I had my own kitchen. Not that I know how to cook, but it couldn’t be that hard to learn. Hell, it would be nice to simply have a _house_.

House. House…Oh! I could research the Miller house for anything spooky! 

Sam wrote Jim Miller’s information on a scrap paper earlier and left it in the pocket of his jeans. I sift through the pile of dirty clothes until I find the huge heap of denim that belongs to Giant Sam. Armed with the scrap paper and my laptop, I get comfortable at the table and begin my search.

Residential property information is public record, for the most part. The easiest thing to find out is the sales records. The Miller house was built in 1961 and had three previous owners before the Miller’s bought it five years ago. As far as I can tell, no one died in the house before it was sold. No spirits lurking around, then.

Time to go back further. What land was the property built on? What used to be in Charleston before it was colonized? A simple internet search should tell me.

Charleston is part of Coles County. Shit. Incorporated as a city in _1865?_ Am I seriously supposed to sift through nearly an entire centuries’ worth of information? It’s not like it would all be online anyway. Whatever, I’ll find out what I can here.

Further digging tells me that the Charleston Township was originally surveyed in 1831. Which is a nice way of saying Native Americans lived there peacefully since the beginning of time until the Europeans massacred them for their land in 1831. But Charleston is only ten square miles. Even if Native Americans lived in Illinois (or even Coles County) and died there, can Charleston be considered a tribal land? There’s a low chance.

The Miller’s house wasn’t built on or near a graveyard, either. Nope, Charleston became known for its university. So if the land is clean, and the house is clean, what caused Jim Miller’s death?

Twenty minutes later the boys return.

“Hello, Fathers,” I greet them with a grin. Sam rolls his eyes. “How’d the confession go?

“There was nothing really to confess,” Sam says. “Max, the son, was the one who found Jim Miller. He says he woke up and heard the engine running. According to Max, Jim was just a regular dad, didn’t appear to have any problems. No indication for suicide.”

I sigh. I figured as much.

“I got zilch,” Dean says. “I tried to ask the wife about the house itself. She described it as _perfect_. No leaks, electrical shortages, odd settling noises. I searched as much as I could with an infra-red scanner, came up with nothing. No cold spots, sulfur scents, nada.”

“I checked into the property history,” I say. “Nothing bad has happened since it was built, and no freaky atrocities on or near the land.”

Sam sinks heavily onto his bed. “That can’t be it. There’s got to be something.”

“Well, if there was a demon or poltergeist in there, you think somebody would have noticed something,” Dean says.

“So, what, you think Jim Miller killed himself and my dream was just some sort of freakish coincidence?”

Dean and I glance at each other. I give my shoulder the slightest shrug. I believe Sam, but the research doesn’t lie, either. Dean rubs the back of his neck for a moment before tentatively saying, “I don’t know…I’m pretty sure there’s nothing supernatural about that house.”

Defeated, Sam rubs his temples. “Maybe it’s just…maybe it’s connected to Jim in some other way?” With a groan, he presses his palms against his forehead.

“What’s wrong with you?” Dean asks.

Sam’s face scrunches up in pain as he lets out an anguished groan. “Ahh, my head–” He slinks off the bed, onto his knees, and crouches on the floor, gripping his head.

“Sam?” I cross the room and kneel down next to him.

Dean is by my side in a moment. He grabs Sam’s shoulders to keep him upright. “What’s going on? Talk to us.”

Slowly, Sam lifts his head. He faces us, but his eyes are miles away. I put the back of my hand to his forehead. He’s a little warm, but nothing to be concerned about. Sam groans in pain again. There’s nothing we can do until it subsides, and if it doesn’t, well…

Like flipping a switch, Sam’s body goes limp. “It’s happening again,” he gasps as he struggles to his feet.

“Whoa, buddy, take it easy,” Dean says, but Sam’s determined to stand up.

“Something’s gonna kill Roger Miller,” Sam says.

“You had a vision?” I ask.

“Yeah.” Sam looks around. “We gotta go – we have to help him.”

“Hey, whoa, you guys can’t go out dressed like priests,” I say. “Get changed, meet me in the car. I’ll start it up and get Roger’s address.”

Sam stumbles to his duffel on the dresser. Dean throws me a quick look, one that I can barely decipher. Mainly, I detect worry, and a hint of fear. I nod encouragingly before pulling my phone out of my jacket pocket to call the police.

In the Impala, I settle in behind the steering wheel and start the engine. I give a false badge number to the operator and ask for an address on Roger Miller. 450 West Grove, Apartment 1320. I consult the map. Good. That’s only a couple blocks away.

Sam and Dean leave the room in normal clothes. I throw the car into drive but keep my foot on the brake pedal until they’re inside. With Sam’s sense of urgency, Dean doesn’t fight me for the driver’s seat. I drive away immediately.

“Did you get the address?” Sam asks weakly.

“Yeah, it’s not far from here.”

“Good.” Sam takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly.

“You ok?” Dean asks him from the back seat.

“Yeah.”

Dean leans forward. “If you’re gonna hurl, tell Harley to pull the car over. You know, ’cause the upholstery–”

“I’m fine.”

“All right.” Dean fidgets around. It’s obvious he’s not used to relinquishing the wheel, let alone sitting in the back.

“What did you see, Sam?” I ask.

“Roger gets decapitated by a window. Something made it shut while he was looking outside.”

Neither Dean nor I have words.

“Almost there,” I say a few minutes later.

Sam sighs heavily. I look over at him for a moment. He looks at me, then looks back at Dean. “I’m…scared,” he admits softly. “These nightmares weren’t bad enough, now I’m seeing things when I’m awake?”

Dean and I make eye contact through the rear view mirror. What are we supposed to say?

“And these visions, or whatever,” Sam goes on. “They’re getting more intense. And painful.”

“Come on, man, you’ll be all right,” Dean says with an air of lightheartedness. “It’ll be fine.”

It’s like Sam didn’t hear him. “What is it about the Millers?” he wonders aloud. “Why am I connected to them, why am I watching them die? Why the _hell_ is this happening to me?”

“I don’t know, Sam, but we’ll figure it out,” I say with as much sentiment as I can.

“We face the unexplainable every day,” Dean adds. “This is just another thing.”

“No.” Sam shakes his head, irritated. “It’s never been us. It’s never been in the family like this.” Sam stares us down. “Tell the truth, you can’t tell me this doesn’t freak you out.”

There’s no reason to hesitate. “It doesn’t freak me out,” I say with certainty. And it’s true, it doesn’t. It’s definitely weird, but it doesn’t bother me.

Dean, on the other hand, stares straight ahead for a long moment. “This doesn’t freak me out,” he finally says.

Sam turns to his brother. Without a word, he looks away.

West Grove is the next street. I make a left, and the apartment building is on the right. I pull up hastily to the curb, drawing the attention of a man on the sidewalk carrying a bag of groceries. Sam rolls down his window.

“Is that…?” I start. We’re in luck if it is.

“Hey, Roger,” Sam calls.

Roger makes a face. “What are you guys, missionaries? Leave me alone!” He turns to unlock the door to the apartment lobby.

“Swing her around and park somewhere, Harley, we gotta go,” Dean orders.

“No time,” Sam says. He opens the passenger door and leaps out as I step on the gas, which makes me press it harder and jump the curb to avoid slamming the door on a nearby car.

“Watch it!” Dean cries.

I put the Impala into park and kill the engine. “She’s fine. Let’s go.”

By the time Dean and I get out of the car, Roger entered the building and locked the door in Sam’s face. Sam bangs on the glass and yells, “We’re not priests! You have to listen to us! We’re trying to help you!”

“We’ll find another way in,” I say. I grab Sam’s arm. “Come on, Sam!”

Dean looks around. “Back entrance. Let’s go.”

We sprint to the right until we come across a locked gate leading to an alley between the two buildings. Dean kicks it down like he’s kicking through Styrofoam. Inside there’s nowhere to go except the fire escape. Sam leaps up and effortlessly yanks the ladder down. Roger lives on the third floor. We climb up two narrow flights of stairs in less than a minute – but it’s not fast enough.

Above us, a creaky window slides down, but instead of the dull thud on contact with the windowsill, there’s a wet squelching noise. Sam stops in his tracks and his face goes pale. That’s it for him. His vision must have come true. Dean keeps on moving, and I follow him out of curiosity.

One floor up, Roger’s head lies in the flower bed underneath the window. Blood spatters the wall and the glass, decorating the makeshift guillotine.

“What now?” I whisper.

Dean takes out his pocket knife and slides the lock on the adjacent window. “I’m going to take a look inside.” Despite his size, he agilely climbs to the other side. I go to peek in and receive a face-full of kitchen towels.

“Um, thanks?” I say.

“Wipe down our fingerprints as you head back to the car,” Dean says. “I’ll meet you down there.” He disappears inside the apartment.

I wipe down every part of the railings on the landing because I can’t remember what we touched and we can’t take any risks. I make my way back down to Sam. He still stands frozen to the spot, but at least his color returned.

I hand him a towel. “Fingerprints. We don’t want the cops to know we were here.”

Sam nods. We each take a side as we head down to ground level. Not long after we arrive back at the Impala, Dean shows up. I hand him the keys and we get inside.

“What did you find?” I ask from my usual back seat spot.

“Nothing,” he says as he starts the engine. “No sign of forced entry, no sign of _anything_. Just like the Miller’s house.”

“I saw something, in the vision,” Sam says. He closes his eyes as he thinks. “It was like…a dark shape. Something was…something was stalking Roger.”

“And you’re sure it’s not connected to their house?” I ask.

“No, it’s connected to the family themselves.”

“Like a vengeful spirit?” I suggest.

“There’s been a few that latch onto families and follow them for years,” Dean says.

“Angiaks, banshees.” Sam nods, as if he’s convinced this is what it must be.

“Maybe Roger and Jim Miller got involved in something dark and curse-worthy,” I say.

“And now the something is out for revenge. And the men in their family are dying.” Sam’s head quickly shoots up. “Do you think Max is in danger?”

“Let’s figure it out before he is,” Dean says determinedly.

Sam gazes out of his window into the darkness. I see his desolate reflection in the glass. “Well, I know one thing I have in common with these people.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Both our families are cursed.”

Dean lets out an exasperated huff. “Our family’s not cursed! We’ve just…had our dark spots.”

Sam scoffs slightly. “Our dark spots are…pretty dark.”

“You’re…dark…” Dean retorts tactfully.

“We should go back to the Miller house in the morning,” I say.

“Not we,” Dean says, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. He jerks his thumb between he and Sam. _“Us.”_

I slump back in the seat and cross my arms. “Well, I wouldn’t want to interrupt the holiest reunion now, would I?”

The next morning Sam and Dean leave the motel room dressed as priests once more. Since I am not allowed to go, I decide to stay in bed and fall back asleep when they’re gone.

_“GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM!”_

I jerk awake, knife in hand, and point it wearily around the room. Sam and Dean are back, and apparently I didn’t hear them enter. They chuckle lightheartedly at me.

“Your Robin Williams impression sucks,” I grumble at Dean.

Dean shrugs offhandedly. “Eh, it did the job.”

“Find anything on your recent holy mission, Fathers?” I ask.

Sam crosses the room and sneers, “Bite me.” He and Dean begin to undress and change into their regular attire right there in the room. We’ve lived together for so long we’re so beyond caring about privacy. Plus, Sam’s gotten more than an eyeful of Dean and I naked over the months. “But not much, honestly. We only spoke to Max, found out some of his family history.”

“Was it as riveting as the history of Charleston?”

“Not riveting, but not as normal and happy as Max tried to make it seem,” Sam says.

“How so?”

“Good ol’ Uncle Roger used to live next door to the Miller family before they moved into their new house across town,” Dean says. “Apparently they were all pretty close when Max was a kid. When I asked Max if he had all good memories of back then, his expression said no while his answer was, obviously, yes.”

“It was definitely odd,” Sam agrees. “Max didn’t really get defensive, but there’s no doubt he’s hiding something. He seemed scared.”

“Hmm.” I tap my lip. “What next, then?”

“I say we go find the old neighborhood, find out what life was really like for the Millers,” Dean responds. “Unless you want to sleep in some more, Harley.”

I flip Dean off as I get out of bed. He chuckles, amused.

It takes eleven minutes to drive across town, to the Millers’ old neighborhood. With both Roger and the Millers’ house occupied by new owners and therefore unattainable, we interrogate the neighbor across the street as he waters his lawn.

“Hi there,” the man greets us as we approach.

“Hello,” Sam says pleasantly. He glances around. “This is a nice neighborhood. You lived here long?”

“Yeah, almost twenty years now. It’s nice and quiet.” He looks the three of us over. “Why, you looking to buy?”

“No, no, actually…we were wondering if you might recall a family that used to live over there.” Sam points to the Millers’ old house.

“Yeah, the Millers,” Dean adds. “They had a little boy, Max.”

The man gazes across the street and his face darkens. “Yeah, I remember.” He brings his focus back to us. “So, uh, what’s this about? Is that poor kid okay?”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Well, in my life I’ve never seen a child treated like that.” The man shakes his head. “I’d hear Mr. Miller yelling and throwing things clear across the street. He was a mean drunk. He used to beat the tar out of Max. Bruises. Broke his arm two times, that I know of.”

“This was going on regularly?” I ask.

“Practically every day. In fact, that thug brother of his was just as likely to take a swing at the boy. But the worse part was the stepmother. She’d just stand there, checked out, not lifting a finger to protect him. I must have called the police seven or eight times. Never did any good.”

“Wait – you said stepmother?” Dean asks.

The man scratches his head. “I think the real mother died. Some sort of…accident. Car accident, I think.”

Sam gasps suddenly and grips his head. “Oh, God.” We know that sign, now. Sam’s seeing something. Dean grips his brother’s arm and guides him away.

I hastily wave to the neighbor. “Thanks for your time.” He frowns as we leave.

Sam stops wincing in pain when we reach the Impala. He looks around with wide eyes, but he’s seeing something else. Dean and I exchange worried glances. There’s nothing we can do until the vision is over. At least Sam doesn’t seem to be in any pain.

When Sam recovers, he stares at us with horror written across his face. "Max is doing it. Everything I've been seeing."

“The fuck?” Dean says.

“Well, I didn't see that one coming,” I mutter. Sam shoots me a look. "It's a figure of speech, Sam, get with the program."

"Are you sure it's Max?" Dean asks. Sam nods. Our game plan just changed. It’s time to pay Max a visit.

When we’re in the car and driving away, Dean asks Sam, “How’s Max pulling it off?”

“I don't know, telekinesis?"

"What, so he's a psychic? A spoon bender?"

“Dean, I just saw him control a knife _with his mind_ and shove it into his mother’s eye socket. He’s got to be _something_.”

I piece together some dots while they argue. “Max was at the house when Jim died. Hell, he found the body. That’s pretty convenient. You actually saw _Max_ , in this recent vision, but what about Roger? Where was Max when that happened?”

“Right,” Dean says. “I searched the apartment, I didn’t find anything.”

Sam shrugs powerlessly. “Maybe Max was able to get away before we got there. I saw a shadow in my vision, remember? I know it’s Max!” He scoffs and shakes his head. “These visions, this whole time…I wasn’t connecting to the Millers. I was connecting to Max. The thing is, I don’t get why.”

“Well, you see the future, he’s got the Force,” I say. “The psychic link's there.”

“Harley, Max is a monster,” Dean says angrily. “He’s already killed two people, now he’s gunning for a third.” Obviously he doesn’t want his brother associated with a serial killer in the making.

“With what he went through, the beatings and stuff…to want revenge on those people?” Sam shrugs again. “I’m sorry, but it doesn’t sound insane.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I agree softly.

“Yeah, but it doesn’t justify murdering your entire family!” Dean says hotly. He yanks the wheel to the right and parks across the street from Max’s house. “He’s no different from anything else we’ve hunted, all right? We’ve gotta end him.”

“Dean, we can’t _kill_ Max,” I say.

“Then what?” he asks forcefully. “Hand him over to the cops? Say, ‘Lock him up, officer, he kills with the power of his mind!’”

“Point taken,” I say. “Plan A, then?”

“No way,” Sam says. “Forget it.”

The fight seems to have left Dean. “Sam,” he says softly, in an attempt to reason with him.

“He’s a person,” Sam insists. “We can talk to him.”

Dean looks at me helplessly.

“I think it’s worth a shot, Dean,” I say. “It can’t hurt.”

“Promise me you’ll follow my lead on this one,” Sam tells Dean.

After a long pause, Dean says, “All right, fine. But I’m not letting him hurt anybody else.” He reaches over to the glove box and unearths a silver Glock 17 9mm. He tucks it in his waistband before exiting the car. Sam and I follow.

Conveniently, the front door is unlocked. Sam, Dean and I stumble in. Down the hall, Max and his stepmother face off. At our entrance, they turn to us. Max’s face is red and sweaty, and his eyes are puffy. They must have been talking heatedly. We arrived in the nick of time, then. Third time’s the charm.

“What are you doing here?” Max asks defensively.

“Uh, sorry to interrupt,” Dean says with a half-chuckle.

Keeping his tone light, Sam asks, “Max, can we talk to you outside for just one second?”

Max’s brows pull together. “About what?” he asks warily.

“It’s…it’s private. We wouldn’t want to bother your mother with it.”

Hesitantly, Max nods. “Okay.”

“Great,” Sam says.

We turn towards the front door. Being closest to it, I reach forward and open it. Before I’ve pulled the door back more than a few inches, it suddenly flies out of my hand and slams shut. What the hell? I look back. One by one, the plantation shutters all around the room swing closed, _bang, bang, bang!_

“You’re not priests,” Max says through gritted teeth.

Dean draws his gun but it’s immediately yanked from his hand by an invisible force. Max takes possession of the gun and aims it at us. That plan went well.

“Max, what’s happening?” Mrs. Miller asks nervously.

“Shut up,” Max growls.

Still, she talks. “What are you doing?”

“I said shut up!” When Max grinds his teeth down, Mrs. Miller goes flying backwards. Her forehead makes contact with the edge of the kitchen counter and she slumps to the ground, unconscious.

“Max, calm down.” Sam wants to reason with Max, but he’s tentative with his words. So far, Max is more dangerous than anything we’ve encountered. Unless he says the right things, we may not walk out of here alive.

“Who are you?” Max asks Sam, and he, thankfully, sounds a lot calmer.

“We just want to talk.”

“Yeah, right!” Max brandishes the gun. “That’s why you brought this!”

“That was a mistake, all right? So was lying about who we were. But no more lying, Max. Okay? Just please, hear me out.”

“About what?”

“I saw you do it. I saw you kill your dad and uncle before it happened.”

Max’s face twists in confusion. “What?”

“I’m having visions. About you.”

“You’re crazy.”

Sam smirks. “So what, you weren’t gonna launch a knife at your stepmom?” He points to his eye. “Right here?” Max’s confusion grows. “Is it that hard to believe, Max? Look at what you can do.”

The tension radiating from Max dissipates slightly as his eyes brim with tears. Sam’s words are working, miraculously.

“Max, I was drawn here, all right? I think I’m here to help you.”

“No one can help me,” Max says with a sob.

“Let me try,” Sam pleads. “We’ll just talk, me and you. We’ll get Dean, Harley and your stepmom out of here.”

“No way,” I say as Dean says, “Uh-huh.”

Max has the same opinion, as the chandelier above us begins to violently shake. “Nobody leaves this house!” he yells.

“And nobody has to, all right?” Sam says quickly. “They’ll just…they’ll just go upstairs.”

“We’re not leaving you alone with him,” I say forcefully.

“Yes you are,” Sam tells us, without taking his eyes off Max. “Look, Max. You’re in charge here, we all know that. No one’s going to do anything you don’t want to do. But I’m talking five minutes here, man.”

“Sam!” Dean growls.

But Sam chose the right words. The chandelier slowly becomes immobile again, and Max seems to relax slightly.

“Five minutes?” he repeats. After a pause, he looks to Dean and I. “Go.”

Dean edges around Sam and Max on his way to the kitchen to retrieve Mrs. Miller. He rouses her and helps her to her feet, and we go upstairs. I trail behind, watching Sam and Max take a seat in the living room.

Upstairs, Dean guides Mrs. Miller into the guest room. She takes a seat on the bed, shaken and visibly confused. Dean approaches me.

“I’m going to stay at the top of the stairs,” I tell him quietly.

Dean grabs my arm. “What? Harley, no. Just stay here. We can’t put ourselves or Sam in danger.”

“Dean, we need to hear what’s going on. What if things go south? We won’t know when or how to help Sam.”

“Will that matter if the freaky kid can launch us across the room with his mind?” Dean’s grip on my arm gets a little tighter, but one look into his eyes and I know he’s just protecting me. He won’t risk losing both Sam and I.

“Okay,” I say quietly.

Mrs. Miller sits on the edge of the bed, her eyes fixed on one spot in front of her. Her stepson threatened her, held us at gunpoint, threw her into the kitchen counter – and expressed psychic powers to do most of that – yet she hasn’t shed a tear, hasn’t said a word. I see how she stood idly by while her husband and brother-in-law abused her stepson, and I come to the conclusion that I don’t blame Max for what he did one bit.

“Hey.” Dean gently nudges my arm with his shoulder. “Earth to Harley. Where’d you go? You’ve been staring at Mrs. Miller for a while.”

I shake my head. “I don’t get it. How she could’ve done what she did, even though what she did was nothing.”

We share a look of longing and sadness, but it’s disrupted by a loud _thud_ and a subsequent smaller thump. Dean raises his eyebrows.

My eyes widen. “Sam.” I spin on the spot and head for the stairs before Dean has a chance to call my name. On the top step I meet Max. There’s no hesitation from him: he sees me, his eyes narrow, and an invisible force pulls my body forward and I tumble down the stairs.

I roll to a stop at the bottom. My back, hips and elbows hurt from taking the brunt of each impact, but at least I was able to react quick enough to protect my head and neck. I get up, shake the pain off, and look around.

Sam’s nowhere in sight, but the china cabinet is about six feet away from its original spot. Behind its new home is a hall closet. One plus one equals two.

“Sam!” I shout at the corner of the cabinet and closet. “Sam, can you hear me? Are you okay?”

Sam lets out a yell, followed by a hard whack. From the way the cabinet shook a bit, I think he flung himself at the closet doors. “I can’t move it!”

“Well, if you can’t, neither can I.” I put my body weight into the cabinet nonetheless.

“Damn it! Harley, get upstairs. I saw something! Max is going to kill Dean!” Sam throws himself at the doors again, to no avail.

“What?” I listen harder for any commotion upstairs. I turn to go, and then –

_“Aaarrgh!”_

The china cabinet goes flying back and the closet doors burst open. Sam emerges, breathing hard.

“Holy shit, did you just channel the Force?” I ask.

Sam gives the slightest of nods. “Don’t tell Dean. Let’s go.” He ascends the stairs three at a time. I try to skip every other one but it’s faster if I just sprint up each one.

The guest bedroom door is shut now. Most likely locked, but Sam doesn’t bother checking. With his momentum from climbing the stairs he bursts through the door like the Juggernaut. I squeeze in behind him and see Max levitating the gun at Dean, who appears to be protecting Mrs. Miller.

“Dean!” I make a lunge forward but Sam throws out one huge arm to stop me.

“Max, don’t!” Sam pleads. “Don’t. Please. Please, Max. We can help you, but this, what you’re doing…it’s not the solution. It’s not going to fix anything.”

Shaking slightly, Max turns slowly toward Sam. He looks awful, worse than before. Watery, red, puffy eyes. Saliva building up around his mouth. Fatigued, defeated, broken. But then, a moment of relief crosses his face.

“You’re right,” Max says serenely. Before any of us can react, the gun spins in the air and fires into Max’s skull.

Later that night, the three of us sit in silence in our motel room. There hasn’t been any words worth saying yet.

After Max killed himself, Mrs. Miller finally broke down. Cried, said she’d lost everyone. I had no sympathy for her. We got rid of any trace that we were there. Fingerprints on the gun, on the stairs and cabinet and front door. And we left. Left Mrs. Miller to clean up the mess.

Finally, Sam breaks the silence. “If I’d just said something else. Gotten through to him somehow.”

I shake my head solemnly. Dean says, “Don’t do that. Don’t torture yourself. It wouldn’t have mattered what you said, Max was too far gone.”

“When I think about how he looked at me, right before.” Sam closes his eyes, then looks at me. He knows I saw it too. “I should have done something.”

“You risked your life, Sam,” I say. “You couldn’t have done anything differently. Max was tortured by his past, and it finally consumed him.”

“It wasn’t just his past, Harley,” Sam says. “They were still abusing him. It was only until he got his powers that he realized he could do something about it. Guys, Max is like me. More than you think.”

“I thought we established that he’s not,” Dean says stubbornly.

“Listen to me. Max’s powers started about six months ago, about the same time I started getting visions. That’s not all. When his dad would get drunk he’d yell and blame Max for everything wrong in his life, including the death of his wife. She died in Max’s nursery while he was asleep in his crib. A fire started, and his mom burned up on the ceiling.”

“What the hell?” I whisper. Dean is speechless.

“The demon that killed mom and Jess killed Max’s mom as well,” Sam says with resolve. “Now Max and I have these abilities. We’re connected somehow. It’s like…we were chosen for something.”

“But what?” I say. “What would killing your mothers and giving you powers over twenty years later have to do with, well, _anything?”_

“Maybe the demon knows something about Max and I that we don’t,” Sam says.

Dean vehemently shakes his head. “No, man, just stop. That’s not what this is about. It’s about what the demon did to our family and how we’re going to find it and kill it. That’s all.”

Sam and I look at each other, speaking words we can’t say. There’s no use trying to convince Dean that this is anything more than what he said. Hunting and killing the demon. The supernatural stuff with Sam, that’s hitting too close to home for Dean’s liking. He needs things to be black and white. But I saw what Sam did in the closet. He moved that cabinet with his mind. There’s no doubt that Sam’s getting stronger in his psychic abilities. But why?

When we’re all in bed an hour later, lying in the dark, Dean speaks up. “I know what we need to do about your premonitions, Sam. I know where we have to go.” He sounds serious, like he spent a lot of time thinking about this.

Sam and I are able to turn to each other and share a confused look in the dim light from the moon. This is more than we could have hoped for in Dean’s case. He’s actually trying to _help?_

“Where?” Sam asks, with a hint of hopefulness.

“Vegas,” Dean deadpans. Then he chuckles.

I scoff, but end up laughing. Sam does, too.

“What?” Dean says in all sincerity. “Come on, man. Craps tables. We’d clean up!”

“Good night, guys,” Sam says, but there’s a smile in his voice.

“’Night, Sam.” I roll over and snuggle close to Dean.

“Maybe poker,” Dean whispers.

I grin into his chest. “Go to sleep.”


	14. Shadow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If you've made it this far, I deeply congratulate and sincerely thank you for sticking with my insanity. The chapters are becoming more my own so I can, as I said to a friend, "Stop riding Kripke's coattails".
> 
> I thought I had fun writing the previous chapter, but this one takes the cake (so far). I feel like I was able to channel Sam and Dean a whole lot better during the original content. I hope you like it, cuz I really do.
> 
> Um, let's see. Harley makes a discovery. Meg makes her debut. John makes a reappearance. There's a sex scene that I was advised to make more descriptive but ugh as much as I'd love to do all those dirty things to Dean it's embarrassing writing them. Just read on.
> 
> Also, I cranked out this chapter in like, 3 days. That's the fastest I've ever written. It helped that I didn't have many patients on day 2 so I was able to write a lot at work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There was about a 5 year gap between the old chapters 1-10 and chapters 11-13. My writing style changed, I've changed, and since I mirror my female leads to my personality, Harley may get darker and more cynical. 
> 
> My biggest regret is that I stuck so diligently to the scripts for so goddamn long. I mean, come on, 13 fucking chapters?? I was like, dedicated to rewriting the entire Supernatural show when I first started this. Then again, I didn't plan on ever having these stories online for others to read, so I feel like I have to explain myself before each chapter. It will become more interesting, I swear.
> 
> Remember, if there are any mistakes, from grammar to storyline, drop a comment and tell me to get my shit together.

I don’t like summer. I never have. Summer is bright and sunny and happy. I am none of those things. I am dark, haunted by the ghosts of my past, the monsters of my present, and the uncertainty of my future. No, I don’t like summer. I like when the leaves change, when the rain falls harder, when it gets so mind-numbingly cold you can almost grasp the fingers of death.

It’s summer now, unfortunately. Sam, Dean and I just wrapped up a case in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and we don’t have plans for our next step. We’re supposed to be sleeping, relaxing, just for one night, before we get back at it tomorrow. But the crappy A/C in this crappy motel does little to deter the nighttime heat, and I quickly soaked through the sheets. Dean’s body heat so close to mine didn’t help, either.

At the small table, I sit near the A/C unit and fan myself with a piece of the newspaper. My eyes glaze over as I stare at the front page of the business section lying in front of me. Eventually, my brain picks up on the date. June 18th. We got the paper two days ago. I count on my fingers the weeks until the “official” first day of fall and pout. Still a ways to go.

Wait a minute. It’s June 20th? I dig for my dad’s journal in the mess of papers and books on the table and flip to the back page, to the mini calendar I last consulted in April. My most recent period was…three months ago? I know I’m irregular, but that’s a really, _really_ long time.

No, it’s not possible. I laugh internally. I can’t have kids. The doctors told me that years ago. Developmental abnormalities of the female reproductive system, that’s what they called it in layman’s terms. I never cared. I never wanted kids. Why would I bring life into a world as awful as this?

Could it be, though? Could I have been so careless?

One way to find out.

Silently, I dress in whatever clothes I reach first, some of them Dean’s, and slip out of the motel room. There’s a drug store at the corner. I check my watch – almost midnight. They might be closed. I should go anyway. I won’t be able to do this in daylight, when the boys are awake.

To my relief, they’re open. Without making eye contact with the store clerk, I seek out pregnancy tests and a large bottle of unrefrigerated sweet tea – easier to chug when it’s not cold. At the counter, I pay and leave, still without looking at the clerk.

On the way back to the motel room I drink half the sweet tea. It’s hard to gulp liquids and walk. But I’ve potentially got something a lot harder ahead of me. I roll my eyes, annoyed with myself. That’s so cliché. I open the tests and pocket the naked sticks, dump the trash near the main office so it’s far enough away. Also, less noise inside, less chance of one of the boys waking up. At the motel room door I force myself to down the last of the drink. Should be another ten to fifteen minutes before I need to pee.

I make it to the bathroom without incident. I don’t have to pee quite yet, so I change back into my pajamas to kill time. Finally, nature calls. I awkwardly stick both sticks between my legs and release all that filtered tea. I leave the sticks on the side of the tub while I wash my face and try not to hyperventilate over the next couple of minutes.

Okay, it’s been five minutes. I should look. Shouldn’t I? It won’t change anything if I look or not. I’ll still be in this situation, or I won’t be. Crap, stop trying to philosophize, just _look!_ I creep over to the tub. Kneel down. Look closer.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, _fuck_.

“You’re up early,” Sam tells me around seven in the morning. Hah, I’m up early because I never really went to bed.

I shrug. “I found a possible case.”

Sam grins. “Did you discover it in a dream?”

“That’s your power, psychic wonder. I used the internet. It’s in Chicago.”

“You got any details?”

“Yeah, but let’s wait for Dean to wake up. I don’t feel like repeating myself.”

Sam gives me a funny look. He can tell my mood’s changed. I need to be more careful until I figure out what I’m going to do.

“I’ll go get coffee, then,” Sam says. He gets dressed, grabs the keys, and soon the roar of the Impala’s engine pierces the early morning silence.

Over coffee and packing, I tell the boys about the case. Last month, Ben Swardstrom was found mutilated in his townhouse in Chicago. Local law enforcement found no signs of forced entry. In fact, all the doors and windows were locked from the _inside_ when police arrived, and the alarm was still activated.

Last week, a young woman was found dead in her apartment. Same deal – all windows and locks intact, door locked from the inside, alarm on. I had the boys hooked at “mutilated”. We load up the Impala and head northeast to Illinois.

“If the police already released the crime scene on the first guy and investigated the girl, how are we gonna get in?” Dean asks somewhere in Missouri.

“Harley, you said the alarms were still activated _after_ the murder, right?” Sam asks.

“Yeah.”

“So someone got in and out without tripping the alarm. We could pose as the alarm system company inspectors checking out faulty alarms.”

“Good thinking, Sammy,” Dean says.

“You know what would also be good thinking?” Sam asks innocuously. “Changing the cassette tape.”

“Dude, you know that tape’s stuck in there. I haven’t figured out how I’m gonna take it out without tearing the whole stereo apart.”

“You got a pocket knife? A fork? Anything pointy? I’ll take care of it for you.” Sam reaches forward to dig around the glove box, and Dean punches him in the arm. “What the hell, man?”

“Don’t you touch my car,” Dean says with murder in his eyes.

I curl up in the back seat and try to take a nap, letting their bickering about what’s an acceptable genre of music lull me to sleep.

The next afternoon, I sit on a cushioned chair next to the window in our hotel room. Yep, I said hotel room. We should come to the big cities more often. The last time we had a room this nice was in New York.

Sam and Dean left not too long ago to check out the apartment of the most recent victim, Meredith Blake. My job is to research any connection between the two cases and hit up Chicago PD, via telephone or database, for more information. I work fast to keep my mind off other topics, and because it’s not going to take long for the boys to get into the apartment, do a sweep with EMF, assess the area, and leave.

Two hours later, Sam and Dean return with an interesting story and a deep dish pizza, and I kind of feel back to my old self as we talk.

“So, the landlady lets us in,” Dean says with his mouth full. “She doesn’t really want to, ’cause she said someone from the alarm company stopped by yesterday. But my Blue Steel face and clever words put her at ease.”

Sam and I both choke out laughter. Dean responds with a scowl.

“Blue Steel?” I repeat, as Sam says, “Those clever words were mine, by the way.”

Dean angrily takes a bite of pizza. “Anyway. We get in the apartment. Right away, I notice the chain on the door is broken. The landlady said they had to cut it to get in. Everything else was like you said, Harley.”

“Right,” Sam agrees. “No signs of any kind of struggle, no weapons, no prints. The apartment was in impeccable condition – except for the blood spatter.”

“I noticed a blood spatter report in the case file,” I say. “They said it was inconclusive.”

“Call this inconclusive.” Dean hands me his phone. “Look at that, then the next one.”

The first picture is of the blood spatter I saw earlier. The second is those same blood drops connected by duct tape, and they form some weird symbol. Somewhat alien, like something out of _Star Trek_. Or, kind of like two scythes mirrored over a zero. Whatever it is, I’ve never seen it before.

“The landlady said Meredith was ripped up in pieces. That it looked like a wild animal did it,” Dean goes on.

“Any hits on the EMF?” I ask.

“Off the charts,” Dean says.

“What did you find, Harley?” Sam asks.

“There’s no connection between Ben and Meredith. He was a banker, she a waitress. Lived on opposite sides of town. The only thing I found in the case files that they have in common was, their hearts were missing.”

We all share a raised-eyebrow look. 

“Maybe it was a werewolf,” Dean suggests.

“No, not a werewolf,” Sam says, his brows pulled together in concentration. “The lunar cycle’s not right.”

“Plus, whatever did this didn’t leave a trace,” I point out. “Werewolves are messy.”

“It had to be a spirit of some sort,” Sam says.

I indicate Dean’s phone. “Our only lead is that symbol.”

Dean slumps back in his chair, tucks one fist under his chin, and stares intently at the empty pizza box. “We can check the journals and whatever books we have on us, but if we don’t come up with anything, I say we hit the local bar and continue our search in the morning.”

“You would have _never_ made it through college,” Sam says, shaking his head.

“Dude, I barely made it through high school.”

We end up at a bar just after sunset. I order a beer to keep up appearances for now, but every so often I pour some into Sam or Dean’s glass when they aren’t looking. But then I think, there’s no way Dean and I can raise a kid the way we were raised. It’s stupid, preposterous. And we’re not about to give up the job for a white picket fence without finding John and the demon. So why can’t I drink if I’m not going to keep it? The thought is strangely uplifting.

“Then she tells us, ‘Your alarm company is about as useless as boobs on a man’,” Dean says, and we all laugh. “I swear, it was hard to keep a straight face.”

“But boobs on a man would make a nice cushion when cuddling,” I say thoughtfully, then look pointedly at Dean’s chest.

He frowns. “I am _not_ giving up my chiseled pecs so you can have an extra set of pillows at night.”

“Chiseled pecs?” I scoff. “ _Sam’s_ the one with chiseled pecs. You’re more of a ‘I don’t have to work out to be fit’ kind of guy.”

“You checkin’ out my brother?” Dean says with narrowed eyes.

Slightly confused, I respond with, “I don’t know if you’re more bothered about me checking out your brother or me checking out another guy in general.”

“He’s my brother!”

“So I can check out another guy?”

Dean grits his teeth. “Sam, help me out here. Sam?”

But Sam checked out of the conversation a while ago. Ignoring Dean, he gets up and heads to a table across the room, where he taps the shoulder of a young woman. She turns around and smiles up at Sam, her face full of recognition, and then they embrace. Dean and I wiggle our eyebrows at each other. Go, Sam!

“He’s got a thing for blondes,” I tell Dean.

“Who doesn’t? Are we going to go introduce ourselves?”

“Why, so you can check her out?”

“I need to see if she’s good enough for Sammy.”

I laugh. “Oh, please. You’re just thinking with your downstairs brain.”

Dean leans forward, smoldering, and lowers his voice to say, “Maybe I am. I’m thinkin’ you, me, and an empty bathroom stall.”

I laugh again, this time louder. “You’re such a romantic.”

Still, we head over to Sam and his new friend in time to hear her say, “Gosh, Sam, what are the odds we’d run into each other?”

Sam laughs lightly. “Yeah, I know. I thought I’d never see you again.”

“Well, I’m glad you were wrong,” the woman says beguilingly, staring deeply into Sam’s eyes. Dean clears his throat loudly. The woman throws a dirty look his way and snaps, “Dude, cover your mouth.”

“Oh, Meg, this is my brother, Dean, and his–”

But Sam doesn’t get to say what I am, because Meg trains a pair of dangerous eyes to my right and says, “ _This_ is Dean?”

With a smug half-grin, Dean says, “So, you’ve heard of me?”

Meg scoffs. “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of you. Nice, the way you treat your brother like luggage. Why don’t you let him do what he wants to do? Stop dragging him over God’s green earth.”

“Meg, it’s all right,” Sam says quickly.

I frown at Dean, and he sticks out his bottom lip, baffled. After a long, tense silence, Dean whistles quietly.

“Okay, awkward. I’m gonna get another drink.” Dean puts his hand around my waist and guides me over to the bar. “The hell was that?” he says when we’re out of earshot.

“Maybe she’s an old friend from school?” I suggest.

“Then why would she think I’m dragging Sam ‘all over God’s green earth’?”

I just shrug.

Sam rejoins us a few minutes later and suggests we leave. When we’re outside the bar, Dean rounds on Sam.

“Who the hell was she?” he orders angrily.

“I don’t really know,” Sam says. He doesn’t look smitten, he looks puzzled. Interesting. “I only met her once, so meeting up with her again? It’s weird.”

“And what was she saying? I treat you like luggage?” Dean’s voice continues to rise. I grip his arm, but it doesn’t do much. “What, were you bitching about me to some chick?”

“Look, I’m sorry, Dean,” Sam says sincerely. “It was when we had that huge fight on the way to Indiana. But that’s not important, just listen–”

“Well, is there any truth to what she’s saying? I mean, am I keeping you against your will, Sam?”

“No, of course not. Would you listen to me?”

I yank Dean’s arm harder. He takes a step back. “What?”

“I think there’s something strange going on here,” Sam says quietly. “I met Meg weeks ago, literally on the side of the road. And now I run into her in some random Chicago bar? At the same time we’re investigating someone that was slaughtered by something supernatural?”

“I don’t know, random coincidence?” Dean shoves his hand into his pocket for the car keys. “It happens, you know.”

“Yeah it happens, but not to us.” Sam sighs. “Look, I could be wrong. I’m just saying that there’s something about this girl that I can’t quite put my finger on.”

Dean and I share a knowing smirk. “Well, I bet you’d like to,” Dean says mischievously.

Sam rolls his eyes. “Do me a favor. Check and see if there’s really a Meg Masters from Andover, Massachusetts, and see if you guys can’t dig anything up on that symbol on Meredith’s floor.”

“What are you going to do?” I ask.

“I’m gonna watch Meg.”

I let out a snort that hurts my nose, and Dean grins and says, “Yeah, you are.”

“I just want to see what’s what,” Sam says with a frown. “Better safe than sorry.”

“All right, you little pervert,” Dean teases.

“Dude,” Sam snaps.

“I’m going, I’m going.” Dean tosses the keys to Sam, and then he and I cross the street and head back to the hotel on foot. After turning the corner, Dean pulls me to him by my waist. “You know, as long as Sam’s gonna get his kicks, we might as well get ours.”

“Hmm, now you’re _definitely_ thinking with your downstairs brain,” I say with a grin.

All the way back to the hotel I battle with my thoughts. Should I have sex with Dean? Well, it can’t hurt anything. The damage is done. Do I want to have sex with Dean? If the answer to that question is ever no, kill me. Will Dean notice if I try to avoid sex? Probably. So, go with it. Succumb to the passion. Forget about anything else.

While I pull the keycard from my pocket, Dean presses his body against my back. His hands slide around my hips, up my stomach, over my breasts, as his hot breath tickles my neck. Miraculously, I get the door open. Dean walks forward, guiding me inside, and in one fluid motion he slams the door shut and pins me back against it.

While Dean’s lips explore my neck, my jawline, my ear, I feel for his jeans, for the bulge under the thick fabric. Undo the belt buckle, yank it out of the loops. Run my hands up his chest under his shirt, along the lines of his muscles, the absence of hair. I may joke about his physical appearance, but Dean’s still the sexiest man I’ve ever laid eyes on.

Then we trade. I taste his lips, his skin, as he attempts to remove the top half of my clothes. After Dean sheds his ten layers, I push him across the room until he falls back on the bed. He watches me take off my jeans with hungry eyes. In just my bra and panties I straddle him, and I feel him grow harder as we kiss deeply. I move my lips down to his neck, across his chest, down his stomach. His eyes don’t leave me as I slowly unbutton his jeans, lower the zipper, pull them down.

Dean leans his head back and moans as I take him in my mouth. I start out slow, but as I get progressively faster he grips the sheets, moaning slightly. Then he lifts his head, grabs my hair and guides me up.

“God damn,” he whispers before crushing his mouth on mine. As we kiss, we trade places on the bed and he removes my remaining clothes. With my legs up on his shoulders, it’s my turn to grip the sheets and moan.

He keeps my legs over his shoulders as he comes up and moves closer, moves inside me. He slides in and out very easily after going down on me, and after a while his momentum increases so fast that he has to abruptly stop.

“Hang on.” With a regretful groan, he pulls away. I take the moment to, once again, trade places. I give him a chance to recover with gentle kisses, my hands in his hair, with actions of a tender, longing desire to never let the moment end.

When he’s ready, I ride him. Slowly, up and down, feeling each movement with exaggerated leisure. It drives him crazy. When he can’t take it anymore, he moves me on all fours and comes at me from behind hard and deep until he reaches his end.

“God _damn_ ,” Dean says again, but this time it’s with disdain. “Now we have to work.”

“Maybe we should have done that first.”

Dean grins and kisses me. “Or, we can just do it again after.”

“I like the way you think,” I say, smiling. “Come on, let’s get the research over with.”

I tackle the symbol while Dean does a background check on Meg. He comes up with information relatively quickly while I still have zilch on the symbol. Dean decides to hit up the police department and see if there’s anything I didn’t find the first time around.

“Harley, check this out,” Dean says a half-hour later. He just got off the phone with a young clerk in the PD office, a very nice, very gay man by the name of Jensen. It really tested the boundaries of Dean’s flirting skills, but he came away with a gold mine. “Look at the birth cities of the two victims.”

“Lawrence, Kansas? Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Harley, these murders could be connected to the demon. Hell, it could be _the_ demon that’s doing the killing. We should call Dad.”

“Pump the brakes, Dean,” I say in my best anxiety-riddled compassionate tone. “We need more information. If this is linked to demons, maybe that will help identify the symbol. We should know what we’re getting ourselves into.”

Dean grinds his teeth for a few long moments. “Remember Caleb?”

I make a face. “Um, yeah. My dad’s old buddy.”

“My dad’s, too. Maybe he’ll know something about it.”

I nod. “Okay, you’re right.” I pull out my phone and notice the time. Almost ten. This has been a long night, and I have a feeling it’s only going to get longer.

Caleb gives us a plethora of information on the symbol, but leaves us with a lot of questions. We call Sam next to update him. Dean puts the phone on speaker in the center of the table, just like it was with Caleb.

“ _Hey, guys_ ,” Sam says.

“Let me guess,” Dean says thoughtfully. “You’re lurking outside that poor girl’s apartment, aren’t you?”

“ _No_ ,” Sam says immediately. Dean looks at me and holds a finger to his lips. Then, reluctantly: “ _Yes_.”

“You’ve got a funny way of showing your affection,” Dean says.

“ _Did you find anything on her or what?_ ” Sam says with obvious impatience.

“She checks out,” I say, consulting the notes Dean wrote. “There’s a Meg Masters in the Andover phonebook. We found her high school photo as well, it’s her.”

“So, why don’t you go knock on her door and, uh, invite her to a poetry reading, or whatever it is you do?” Dean says with a chuckle.

“ _What about the symbol? Any luck?_ ”

“Kind of,” I say. “It’s Zoroastrian, a sigil for a Daeva. Symbols like these haven’t been used or seen since like, two thousand years before Christ.”

“ _What’s a Daeva?_ ”

“It translates to ‘demon of darkness’,” I say. “A Zoroastrian demon. They’re savage, animalistic.”

“Yeah, they’ve got nasty attitudes, like demonic pit bulls,” Dean adds.

“Thanks for that visual, Dean.”

Dean smiles. “You’re welcome.”

“ _Anyway_ ,” Sam interrupts.

“Anyway,” I say, “These Daevas, they have to be summoned or conjured, and it’s not easy.”

“These suckers tend to bite the hand that feeds them,” Dean interjects. “And, uh, the arms, and torsos.”

“ _What do they look like?_ ”

“Nobody really knows,” I say. “They haven’t been seen for a couple millennia. And for someone to summon a demon that ancient? They’ve got to have some serious power.”

“I think we’ve got a major player in town, and I don’t think it’s Meg,” Dean says. “Now, Sammy, why don’t you go give that girl a private strip-o-gram?”

“ _Bite me_.”

“No, bite her. Don’t leave teeth marks though–” The line clicks. “Sam? Are you–”

I shut the phone. “He hung up.”

We stare at the phone, at the mess on the table. Dean blows a raspberry in the silence. Then our eyes meet.

“Round two?” Dean says. With a smirk, I go and straddle him on the chair.

The moment Dean and I sit back down fully dressed after a frisky round two, Sam’s keycard beeps on the other side of the door. Phew, that was close. It’s been one month and three days since our last incident, which is honestly a record for us. I don’t miss Sam’s various reactions, ranging from a strange, sorrowful lust to full on rage, often with a side lecture about privacy and respect.

“You guys aren’t going to believe this,” Sam says. “ _Meg_ is summoning the Daeva.”

I sit up straight. “What the hell?”

“Watching her paid off. When she left her apartment, I followed her to this abandoned warehouse. There was an altar set up on the top floor, it had some pretty dark stuff. Human hearts, probably our victims’, seriously ancient items. And in the center was the Daeva symbol drawn in blood.”

“A black altar,” I say. “That’s how she’s controlling the Daeva.”

“That’s not all,” Sam says. “She was using some primordial bowl to communicate with someone. She was talking into it, the way witches used to scry into crystal balls or animal entrails.”

“With who?” Dean asks. “With the Daeva?”

“No, you said those things were savages.” Sam paces back and forth a couple of times. “No, this was someone different, someone who’s giving her orders. Someone who’s coming to that warehouse.”

Dean and I lock eyes. “The demon,” we say together.

“What demon?” Sam says impatiently. “The yellow-eyed demon?”

“We went back through the records of the victims,” I say. “Both of them were born in Lawrence, Kansas.”

Speechless, Sam slumps down into an empty chair. “Holy crap.”

“How do these Daeva things fit in with the demon? How does _Meg_ fit in with the demon?” I wonder aloud.

“Beats me,” Dean says. “But I say we trash that black altar, grab Meg, and have ourselves a little chat.”

“No, we can’t,” Sam says. “We shouldn’t tip her off. We’ve got to stake out that warehouse and see who, or what, is showing up to meet her.”

“I don’t think we should do this alone,” Dean says, and I nod.

“Dad?” Sam says quietly. “You think he’ll answer? You think he’ll come?”

“Only one way to find out.” Dean rises to his feet and takes his phone from the desk. He heads near the window to make a call.

“We’re going to need supplies,” I say. “Lots of them.”

Sam nods and leaves the room.

“Dammit.” Dean snaps the phone shut.

“Try again in a few minutes,” I say. Then I think to myself, _Come on, John! This really isn’t the time to play your stupid games. Your sons need you. Hell, I need you. My dad died for the weapon that can end your crusade, and we just might have the opportunity for you to do so. Don’t let his death be in vain._

Dean calls John again. No answer. After another five minutes, he calls one last time and leaves a voicemail. “Dad, we think we’ve got a serious lead on the demon that killed Mom. There’s a huge chance the demon’s going to show up in this warehouse tonight. It’s, uh, 1435 West Erie. If you get this, get to Chicago as soon as you can.” He hangs up the phone, tries to hide the disappointment, the frustration, he has over John, but I’ve seen that look plenty of times over the last few years. I know it well.

Not long after, Sam returns with a loaded duffel. When he puts it on the table, it lands with such a dense _thunk_ that I think it must weigh twenty pounds.

“Jesus, what’d you get?” I say.

“I ransacked the trunk,” Sam says, quite proudly. “Holy water, every weapon that I could think of, exorcism rituals from about a half dozen religions. I’m not sure what to expect, so I guess we should just expect everything.” He looks at Dean. “Dad?”

“Voicemail,” Dean replies shortly.

It’s an hour until midnight. We clean and load the guns, stow knives and holy water and salt on our persons with extras in the bag.

“Big night,” Dean says. I nod.

“God, could you imagine if we actually found that damn demon?” Sam says. His eyes light up with the possibility. “What if this whole thing was over tonight? Man, I’d sleep for a month. Go back to school, be a person again.”

Crap. I look at Dean. He appears slightly confused and irritated, signs that he’s trying to hold back the anger and bite his tongue.

“You want to go back to school?” Dean finally asks in mild disbelief.

“Yeah, once we’re done hunting the thing.” Sam offers a small half grin at Dean, then at me. “Why, is there something wrong with that?”

“No,” Dean says nonchalantly. “No, it’s uh, great. Good for you.”

“I mean, what are _you_ going to do when it’s all over?” Sam asks in such an innocent way that it’s obvious he’s never been in this for the long haul, or that he thinks Dean and I have any other choice.

“It’s never going to be over, Sam,” I say quietly.

“There’s gonna be others,” Dean adds. “There’s always gonna be something to hunt.”

Sam doesn’t seem to understand. “But there’s got to be something that you want for–”

“I don’t want you to leave the second this thing’s over!” Dean abruptly stands up and heads to the dresser. He hangs his head, grips the wood like he wants to break it.

“Dude, what’s your problem?”

Dean turns around. “Why do you think I drag you everywhere, huh? Why do you think we came and got you at Stanford in the first place?”

“Because Dad was in trouble. Because you wanted to find the thing that killed Mom.”

“Yes, that, but it’s more than that, man.” Dean’s voice is thick with emotion. He returns to the dresser and contemplates his next words. “You and Harley, and Dad – I mean, you’re all I have. I want us to be a family again.”

“Dean, we are a family. I’d do anything for you.” Sam folds his hands in his lap and sighs. “But things will never be the way they were before.”

I catch Dean’s eye. He looks at me so helplessly, so lost. Heartbroken.

Sadly, Dean shrugs and mumbles, “Could be.”

Sam doesn’t cave. He never would. He made this decision once before, and he’ll make it again. “I’m not going to live this life forever. When this is all over, you’re going to have to let me go my own way.” He shoves our remaining supplies in the twenty pound duffel, zips it up, and storms out of the room.

“Dean–” I start softly.

“Was that too much to ask, Harley?” he asks with fire.

“No, it wasn’t, but Sam’s a different person, he’s led another life.”

Dean shakes his head. He doesn’t want to hear it. He follows Sam out of the door, and after a long, sullen moment, I follow Dean.

On the way to the warehouse, I decide not to say what I’ve been thinking about John since Dean left him the voicemail. Sam hopes this will end tonight, but John has the Colt and not much time to get to Chicago. Unless he was already somewhat close. Unless…he got wind of the case we found the same time we did. Wishful thinking, huh?

Dean parks in the alley across the street from the warehouse. This entire part of the town is rundown, with boarded up businesses, dim streetlights, trash blowing in the slight breeze. Sam points to the decrepit building-in-question.

“Okay, listen up. There’s a broken service elevator on the right side, and a back entrance that Meg must use, because I doubt she scales the walls each time she goes inside and the front is all boarded up.”

“I’ll take the back entrance,” I say. The boys nod affirmative.

“There’s a bunch of crates and other crap piled high at the back of the room,” Sam continues. “Dean, we’ll have to silently make our way out of the elevator shaft and behind the crates without Meg noticing. Harley, get up to the top floor as quietly as you can but don’t come in the room until we give a signal. You’re our backup.”

“Sir, yes sir,” I say promptly.

Dean salutes Sam. “Aye aye, Captain.”

Sam rolls his eyes and gets out of the car, hauling the duffel with him.

“You think it’s obvious we mask our pain with jokes?” Dean asks me.

“Just a bit. Let’s go.”

We split up across the street. The boys go to the right, Sam directs me to the left. I take out my gun and hold it steady at my waist with two hands as I make my way around the building. I don’t find a door until the very back. It’s unlocked. Good, makes my job easier.

The inside is no better than the outside. The old stairs creak with every step. After I make it halfway up the first set I figure there’s no use trying to be quiet. I still move with precise steps, but I go at a faster pace. _Creak, creak, creak, creak._

At the bottom of the third floor I hear voices. The deep timbre of Sam and Dean, and a higher, female voice. Meg. Crap, that means their cover is blown. I make it to the top of the stairs and hide in the shadows near the doorway with no door.

“Oh, don’t worry, sweetheart,” Dean says silkily. “The shotgun’s _not_ for the demon.”

“So who is it, Meg?” Sam orders forcefully. “Who’s coming? Who are you waiting for?”

There’s a pause. Then, Meg utters a single, triumphant word: “You.”

Oh, fuck. _John!_

But John is pushed from my mind the next instant as an unearthly growl resonates in the air. The Daeva. I allow myself one eyeball to peer into the room, just in time to see a huge shadow slam Sam to the ground and send Dean hurling into the stack of crates. Meg watches with a gleeful smile on her face.

Ok, so this is a trap. The whole thing was a set up. What do I do? Storm the room with guns blazing? Wait for the demon to show up? Go outside to warn John in case _he_ shows up? Usually I’m more composed than this!

I peek into the room once more. Meg is busy unraveling rope. Great, she’s going to tie up Sam and Dean. Then it’s just me versus a psycho bitch and a shadow demon. Wait, the Daeva. I need to get to the altar, that was the plan! Well, part of the plan. I’ll wait for Meg to tie up one of the boys, then. While she’s busy, I’ll make a run for the altar. Hopefully the remaining brother can handle Meg long enough for me to do so.

Something grips my arm. I raise my gun and get ready to scream bloody murder, just in case, but something else covers my mouth. I squint in the darkness and then my eyes bulge to maximum. It’s John!

With a finger to his lips, he guides me off to the side, away from the doorway. Meg must have made quick work of tying Sam and Dean up because she’s now taunting them as they connect the dots I made minutes ago.

As quietly as I can, I lean close to John and whisper, “It’s a trap. For you. She’s working for the demon.”

John nods. “I’m getting closer, and the demon’s getting worried.”

“You need to go. I’ve got a plan.” I press our hotel key card into his hand.

“You’re just like your dad,” John whispers. He grips my shoulder, and the gesture is enough to make my heat skip a beat. _I’ve spent years trying to push your death from my mind, Dad, but I miss you more than you’ll ever know…_

John disappears down the stairs and I assess the situation in the room. Meg straddles Sam, teasing him, kissing his neck. But Dean, he’s got a small blade in his hands and he works at the ropes binding him to a post. Sam’s baiting Meg for a distraction.

“Get a room, you two,” Dean grumbles.

“I liked that you were watching me,” Meg purrs. “Come on, Sammy. You and I can still have a little dirty fun.”

“You want to have fun?” Sam says. “Go ahead, then. I’m a little tied up right now.”

That’s my cue.

“But I’m not,” I say as I move swiftly into the room, gun raised.

Meg remains crouched over Sam, overly confident but too close for a clear shot at anything important. She narrows her eyes and says snarkily, “I was wondering when you’d show up. How’s Daddy?”

No clear shot at anything important? Fine by me. I aim the gun slightly to the left and pull the trigger, landing a clean shot in her shoulder. Meg yelps in pain and falls back. I grip the gun tighter and pistol whip her across the head. She rolls off to the side, groaning, but it’s drowned out by a more threatening growl.

“Harley, get the altar!” Dean yells.

It’s not far, but I have mere seconds to reach it before the Daeva gets me. The shadow demon growls again just as I reach the rotting table. I get a good grip on the old wood and vehemently flip it over in a very satisfying way.

The Daeva growls again, but it’s changed. It’s a growl of liberation. I turn around and see the shadow on the wall grab Meg and drag her across the floor. She fights back the only way she can: digging her fingernails into the wood. With a deafening crash, the shadow demon smashes Meg through the glass windows, and she screams until her body hits the floor.

I step carefully to the ledge. Sam and Dean come up behind me, and we all gaze down at the lifeless, broken body of the psycho bitch.

“I guess the Daeva didn’t like being bossed around,” I say.

“Guess not.” Dean shrugs, then winces. He must have hurt his shoulder when he was thrown into the crates. And both he and Sam have bloody cuts and welts on their faces that look a lot like claw marks. “Hey, Sam?”

“Hmm?”

“Next time you want to get laid, find a girl that’s not so buckets-o’-crazy, huh?”

Sam smiles and shakes his head, then heads for the door.

“I’m serious, dude,” Dean continues as we follow him. “Get you a girl like Harley. How _hot_ was that entrance? And knocking Meg out with the gun?” Dean throws his arm around my shoulders and gives me a squeeze. “We might really need to get our own room tonight.”

I offer a short, uncomfortable laugh. Do I tell them that John was here, that I gave him a key to our room in hopes that he would meet us there? I don’t want to get their hopes up just yet, because what if John took off again and we have to start the search all over? No, it’s probably better that I stay quiet.

And what the hell does Meg know about my dad?

We make it back to the hotel in one piece. On the way to our room, Dean tries to call John, but he doesn’t answer.

“Sam, why didn’t you leave that bag in the car?” I ask when I notice him shift the duffel to his other arm with a shallow grunt.

“Better safe than sorry. Just because we destroyed the altar and the Daevas got revenge on Meg doesn’t mean they’re gone.”

“Whoa, Daevas? As in, plural? I thought there was only one?”

“No. Multiple.”

Dean opens the hotel door. The lights are off – not how we left them. Across the room, the pale light from the window illuminates a silhouette. Dean tenses up and threateningly shouts, “ _Hey!_ ” in his deep tenor and I flip on the light. The silhouette becomes a solid form as it leaves the shadows.

“Dad?” Dean whispers.

It’s John, like I figured it would be, only in the light he looks _very_ different than I remember. Graying facial hair obscures most of his face. Dark circles outline his eyes, giving him a haunted, extremely weary look. His hair is disheveled, his shoulders slightly slumped. Rugged, worn thin, ready for the chase to be over. But when he looks at his sons, his face lights up.

“Hey, boys,” John says with a smile I haven’t seen on him since I was a kid. Still smiling, he nods to me. “Harley.”

Without hesitation, Dean steps forward to embrace his dad. John hugs him back, holds on to him tightly, his eyes brimming with tears. The longer they stay like that, the more I realize that maybe I’ve misjudged John. When they pull apart a strange yearning I don’t typically have hits me like a truck. A strong desire to hug my own father just once more. Twice in one evening, too.

John turns to Sam. Sam’s grown taller than John now, but he shrinks into a child when John offers him a small, melancholy smile. “Hi, Sam.”

Sam warily steps forward, leaving the bag on the floor. “Hey, Dad,” he says softly. It’s clear they missed each other but don’t know how to react.

“Dad, it was a trap,” Dean says. His voice is deeper, a little shaky. Trying not to shed tears. “I didn’t know, I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” John says with a knowing grin. “Harley tipped me off, kept me from going in the room.”

Deans eyes travel between John and I, showing conflicting emotion of relief and slight betrayal. “You were there?”

“Yeah, I was. The trap, it doesn’t surprise me. It’s tried to stop me before.”

“The demon has?” Sam asks.

“It knows I’m close. It knows I’m going to kill it. Not just exorcise it or send it back to hell. Actually _kill_ it. And it’s scared.”

“The Colt,” I whisper.

John’s face grows somber when he looks at me. “Harley, there’s something you need to know. Elkins is dead.”

My heart catches in my throat. “Daniel Elkins?” That’s a name I haven’t heard in years. Elkins had secrets, plenty of information about my dad, about other hunters, about everything supernatural. There’s only one reason he’d be targeted now.

“What?” Dean asks defensively, when all John and I can do is stare at each other.

I take a deep breath and speak quietly. “My dad and I got the Colt from Elkins. We were chasing a fairy tale, no one knew if the gun really existed. Elkins knew, and it took a lot to get the Colt into our possession.”

“The demon you killed in the woods, he was working for the yellow-eyed demon,” John says. “And you killed him with the Colt, which tipped the demons off to its existence.”

“That’s why Meg asked about my dad,” I say. “She knows.”

“Okay, so the demons know the cards we hold,” Dean says. “We can come up with a new game plan.”

“That’s not it, Dean,” John says sadly. “The demons traced the Colt back to Elkins. Somehow, they got it out of Elkins that he gave the Colt to Mark Cooper. They killed Elkins, and–”

“And now they’ll come after me,” I finish. Tears well in my eyes as I look between John, Sam, and Dean, because I know what Dean said earlier stands true for me as well. They are all I have left, they are my family, too. And I can’t put them in danger. A few stray tears escape down my cheeks and I hastily wipe them away. “I…need to…leave,” I manage to choke out.

Rage instantly replaces the confusion on Dean’s face. “No. Are you freakin’ crazy, Harley? I’m not letting you go off on your own!”

“What choice do I have, Dean?” I say angrily. “If they get to me, it will lead them to you, to John. If we split up, I’ll have a better chance of keeping them away while you guys find the yellow-eyed demon.”

Dean’s hands ball into fists. He’s heard this story before. It’s literally the story of his life. “Dad?” he says helplessly.

“If I leave, I can be the one to draw them off,” John says. “She’s right, we need to split up. You three, and me.”

“No, Dad, let us come with you!” Sam insists desperately. “We’ll help. We can…we can split up two and two.”

“Sam, this demon is a scary son of a bitch,” John says. “I don’t want you caught in the crossfire. I don’t want you hurt.”

“Dad, you don’t have to worry about us.”

“Of course I do. I’m your father.” John looks up at his youngest son with shining eyes, conveying a look of a love long lost. “Listen, Sammy, last time we were together, we had one hell of a fight.”

Sam grinds his teeth, fighting back tears of frustration. “Yes, sir.”

The corner of John’s mouth pulls into a small smile. “It’s good to see you again. It’s been a long time.”

“Too long.”

Sam can’t fight the tears any longer. He and John embrace. Even though it’s quicker than John and Dean’s, it’s a huge step forward. They pull apart, and then I’m crying, Sam’s crying, John and Dean have tear streaks on their face. We all share a tearful laugh.

The moment is shattered instantaneously by the growl of a Daeva. A clawed shadow hand pulls John backwards and slams him into the cabinets, then hits Sam in the chest with enough force to knock him down. A second shadow collides with my body, pushing the air from my lungs, and I slide along the floor until my momentum is stopped by my head smashing into the wall.

“No!” Dean roars, just as a third shadow demon launches him into the far wall. His body leaves a hole in the drywall as he slumps to the floor.

There’s no way to fight the Daevas. We can only see their shadows, only feel their attack when the blow has already landed. We are helpless as they toss us around the room, slicing up our bodies with their invisible claws.

“Shut your eyes!” Sam suddenly yells. I don’t think, I react. “These things are shadow demons, so let’s light ’em up!”

The sizzle of a lighted flare precedes a blinding white light. Like nails on a chalkboard, the Daevas let out an irritated screech. Smoke from the flare thickens the air as I try to move from my back to my knees, but everything hurts. Someone grabs my arm and yanks me up. We make it to the hallway and I see it was Sam. Dean emerges from the room supporting John and we all head out of the building.

Sam unlocks the Impala and tosses the duffel bag in the back seat. “All right, come on. We don’t have much time. As soon as the flare’s out, they’ll be back.”

“Wait, Sam,” Dean orders. He now has claw marks on his face to match Sam’s. My shoulder was cut, shredding my sleeve, and I can’t tell if the wetness on my face is sweat or blood. “We can’t leave together. Dad…”

John sighs as he looks us over. “You boys need to stay with Harley. Help each other, protect each other.”

Dean nods, ever the submitting soldier. I don’t like it, but the three of us splitting with John is just one step closer to me splitting from the boys. We all need to separate somehow.

“What about you?” Sam asks John. “We should stick together. We’ll go after those demons–”

“Sam!” Dean yells. “Listen to me! They’re not gonna stop! They’re gonna try again. They can either go after us, or after Dad. If we stay together, it’s a two-for-one special! Meg was right. Dad’s vulnerable when he’s with us. He’s…he’s stronger without us around. He’ll take care of himself, we’ll take care of us.”

Sam turns to John with pleading eyes. “Dad, no.” He grips John’s shoulder, silently begging. “After everything, after all the time we spent looking for you…please. I have to be a part of this fight.”

“Sammy, this fight is just starting,” John says. “We’re all going to have a part to play. For now, you’ve got to trust me, son. You’ve got to let me go.”

No one speaks. There aren’t any words left to say. The four of us together got us closer to death than I’ve been in over two years. John’s been hunting the yellow-eyed demon, which put a target on his back. The yellow-eyed demon has been hunting the Colt, which put a target on _my_ back. If the demon only knew how close those targets coincided…

John looks at each of us in turn with desolate eyes. “Be careful.” He turns and heads to his black Sierra truck at the end of the alley.

“Come on,” Dean says gruffly. The three of us get in the Impala and drive away. But where we drive towards, I don’t know.


	15. Devil's Trap

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ninja Turtles. Vampires. Batman vs. Superman. Demonic possession. Family feud. A classic switcharoo. A shit ton of Latin. 
> 
> Enjoy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter represents the level of integration of the real script into my story that I should have achieved in 2012. I'm sorely disappointed in the earlier chapters. But I'm here. I made it. And if I do say so myself, this is a DAMN good chapter.

The three of us agree that the best place for us to be is where the demons would never think to look – Elkins’ cabin. The demons most likely killed him there, ransacked the place looking for the Colt, then took off. Hopefully (and that’s a _big_ hopefully) they won’t go back to cover their tracks. But going back to the cabin means going closer to the site of my dad’s death than I’ve ever been. Those aren’t exactly wounds I want to dig at right now, but I knew this day was inevitable.

Once we discuss and agree on the location, we drive in silence from Chicago to Manning. The entire journey, the weather is perfectly bright and sunny, just like mid-summer is supposed to be. I wish some clouds would roll on by.

At the base of the mountain leading to Elkins’ cabin, I close my eyes. I don’t want to see the trail. See the spot where the demon set a trap for us. No. I don’t want to remember. I lean my head against the window and close my eyes, feeling every bump in the road by my forehead bouncing on the glass as the Impala climbs higher and higher.

I open my eyes when the car comes to a stop at the cabin. It hasn’t changed much, except for a couple broken windows and the front door hanging off its hinges. Inside is a different story. I thought this place would be ransacked. I didn’t think it would be nearly destroyed. I walk along the east wall and poke at debris with my shoe.

“There’s salt over here,” I say.

“Over here, too,” Sam says. “Right by the door.”

Dean looks over. “You mean, protection against demons salt or ‘whoops, I spilled the popcorn’ salt?”

“He lined the windows, the door,” Sam says. “He was worried about something.”

“He knew,” I say tiredly. “He knew they were coming for him. He put himself at risk the day he gave my dad the Colt. I just don’t know why it took them this long.”

“Um, about that…” Dean comes over with a couple of waterlogged books in his hands. “Check out the windows, the wood, the front door. All the stuff in here is damaged. Water damage, from snow or rain. Elkins has been dead for a long time.”

I give a frustrated sigh. “Do you think John knew that and didn’t say?”

“Why would he keep it a secret?” Sam asks.

“He must have had a reason,” Dean adds.

“No.” I shake my head. “As far as I can remember, John was never like this. My dad talked about him all the time. John’s never been this erratic and secretive. Not since he discovered he’s looking for a demon. The game changed, and so did his personality. Come on, you should know, Dean.”

But the dutiful son just shrugs and says, “He has his reasons.”

“Look, it’s getting dark out,” Sam says. “We need to fix this place up before nightfall. Mainly the windows and doors, for protection.”

While the boys work on the warped front door and its rusted hinges, I find pieces of wood to nail on the windows. There isn’t much worth using from inside, so I end up tearing off panels from the shed outside.

“You know what this feels like?” Dean wonders aloud as he shoves a bureau to the side.

“What?” Sam and I ask.

“Remember that Ninja Turtles movie where they hide out in an abandoned farm?”

“Yes,” I say, while Sam rolls his eyes and continues lining all the entrances with salt. “If only our situation were that easy, though.”

“What, recuperating in a bathtub or gettin’ it on?” Dean asks with a smirk.

“I reiterate, almost nightfall,” Sam says grouchily.

We flip the couch and armchairs back, move as much of the debris as we can to a corner. I check the food reserve. Some non-perishables, but not enough to get us by. We’ll need to make a trip into town tomorrow for supplies. The Impala is too conspicuous; we’ll have to see if Elkins’ truck still runs.

The boys squabble over who gets the bed while I curl up on an armchair. I fall asleep before they make their decision.

The days pass slowly. No cell service, no television, no radio (that works). Our source of entertainment is whatever of Elkins’ books aren’t too jacked up. Dean tried to make a deck of cards with scrap paper but it didn’t work out that well.

If I don’t read the waterlogged books, I usually spend my time thinking. We try not to go outside the cabin too often, only when necessary, so I made myself a little cushioned area by a damaged window and cut a small hole in the wood to see out of. And I think. And think.

The stakes of helping John Winchester escalated the day a demon killed my dad. I hid under Dad’s shadow for so long that I got used to thinking I’d never be a target, never be on my own. How stupidly naïve of me. But my entire life has been intertwined with the Winchesters. I can’t abandon them when the going gets rough.

It wouldn’t be because the going got rough, another part of me thinks. I’d be leaving to protect them. And so I can get rid of the thing inside me. I have to take care of that before too long as well.

After the first week of the same thoughts spinning around and around in my head, I go kind of numb and just stare out of the window during my allotted thinking time.

On day nine, I find Elkins’ journal under the splintered desk in the office where he kept the Colt. The elk’s head isn’t on the wall anymore. It dislodged from its mount and lays in pieces. Shame. I kind of liked it. I take the journal to the couch and sit cross-legged next to Sam.

“What’s that?” he asks.

“Elkins’ journal. I found it in the office. We never bothered to clean up in there.” I flip through the pages with my thumb. “It’s not in bad condition.”

“Must have been hidden well,” Sam says.

“At least it’s something new to read,” I say. I settle in and start from the beginning.

‘ _Vampire hunting. That’s what the Elkins lineage is known for. I intend to keep up the tradition. I turned sixteen today, and my father thought it was time I had my own journal.’_ Huh. Why didn’t I ever start my own journal? Why did I always add to my dads’? I guess it’s not that uncommon nowadays. After all, neither Sam nor Dean started their own journal.

I kick back on the couch reading the journal while Sam and Dean have a debate over the best superhero. Dean advocates for Batman while Sam insists it’s Superman.

Dean scoffs. “Dude, are you kidding? Bats has the brains _and_ the brawn. He could take Super-pants in a fight, hands down.”

“You’re out of your mind,” Sam says, shaking his head. “Superman has superhuman speed and strength. And he’s a bona fide scientist. He has skills he wouldn’t even need to use against a man dressed like a bat.”

I lick my finger and turn a page. “Batman also has the money. He can employ scientists if he wants to.”

“Exactly,” Dean says smugly.

“What happened to a non-objective third party?” Sam complains.

I shrug and Dean grins wide before furthering his argument.

“Besides, Sam, Batman is a peak-performance human with the experience of _ten_ core martial arts. And sure, the Man of Leotards is strong and fast, but he gets beat by a glowing rock. All Batman has to do is put the Krypto-thing into a fancy Bat-doohickey and BAM! Batman wins.”

“You mean Kryptonite?” Sam says with a apprehensive scoff, like he can’t believe his own brother doesn’t remember the word Kryptonite _._ “There’s no way Batman’s Krav Maga and expensive gadgets can help him against the literal _Man of Steel_.”

Dean stares dully at Sam while he takes a swig of beer. After a melodramatic pause, he says, “Batman would kick alien-boy’s ass, and you know it.”

Sam laughs incredulously. “No. No way.”

“I think it’s time for the non-objective third party’s opinion,” Dean says.

“She’s not non-objective, Dean, she’s obviously on your side.”

“Batman’s obviously better,” I say.

“No, he’s not!” Sam whines.

“Okay, okay.” I set the journal to the side and sit up straight. “Sam, answer this question, and it will lead you to the result you desire.” Sam rolls his eyes. I clear my throat dramatically. “Why won’t Superman be able to fight Dracula this evening?”

Dean bursts out laughing, but Sam looks confused.

“Come on, College Boy, use those Stanford brains,” Dean teases.

“Uh, there’s no reason why Superman won’t be able to fight Dracula,” Sam says.

I imitate a buzzer with my voice. “Wrong answer. Dean, the ball is in your court.”

Dean’s smile disappears from his face. “I thought you said Sam had to answer?”

“Yeah, he basically forfeited. That leaves you with the tie-breaker.”

This time, Sam laughs heartily. “He doesn’t know!”

“What’s the answer?” Dean grumbles.

I grin wide. “Superman won’t go near the crypt tonight.”

Sam smacks his palm against his forehead and Dean shouts, “Hah!”, then laughs so hard he gets tears in his eyes. “Batman would take Dracula in a heartbeat. Batman so wins.”

“I’m not playing this game anymore.” Sam gets up and leaves the room, leaving Dean and I to snicker silently.

“Check this out,” I tell the boys.

Sam stops doing push-ups and rests back on his knees. “Is this another vampire fun fact?”

“Huh, vampires,” Dean half-giggles from where he lays on the floor with his legs propped up on an armchair seat, his hand buried in a bag of pretzels. “Gets funnier every time I hear it.”

“Anyway.” I find my place in the journal again. “Vampires don’t actually have fangs. They have a second set of teeth that descend when they attack.”

“Also, vampires don’t actually exist,” Sam says as he resumes his push-ups.

“Daniel Elkins was an expert vampire hunter, and this journal is full of information and stories,” I say. “It’s basically proof that vampires exist _and_ that he’s killed plenty of them. He knows what he’s talking about. Like, once a vampire has your scent, it’s for life. Their weakness is dead man’s blood. And they’ll basically laugh in your face if you wave a cross at them or drive a stake through their heart.”

“Our dads teamed up with Elkins and a bunch of other hunters to take down a vampire nest,” Dean says. “I kind of remember that.”

“Nest?” Sam repeats.

“Yeah, hang on.” I flip back a couple of pages. _“‘Vampires nest in groups of eight to ten. Smaller packs are sent to hunt for food. Victims are taken to the nest, where the pack keeps them alive, bleeding them for days or weeks. Vampires need fresh human blood to survive.”_

Sam grimaces. “Sounds lovely.”

“Good thing they’re extinct,” Dean says as he dips his hand in the pretzel bag once more.

On the thirty-sixth morning of our captivity, there’s a knock on the cabin door.

The three of us look up from our independent activities and stare at each other. A knock? Seriously? All the way out in the middle of nowhere?

I look at Dean and then nod to the door. He looks at the door, then back at me, and shakes his head vehemently. I look to Sam expectantly. He rolls his eyes, annoyed, and goes to the door.

“Telegram for Anne McGillicuddy.”

“Uh…” Sam falters.

“Telegram?” Dean repeats dubiously.

But I leap to my feet and practically run to the door. I elbow Sam to the side. “That’s me.”

The bored delivery man hands me a small clipboard. “Sign here.”

I sign and exchange the clipboard for the telegram. Sam shuts the door. I feel his eyes on me while I stare at the little envelope.

“Aren’t you going to open it?”

But memories hit me like a ton of bricks. There’s only two people who know that Anne McGillicuddy is my favorite alias. And one of those people are dead.

“It’s from John,” I whisper.

“How do you know?” Sam asks.

“Anne is my middle name. McGillicuddy is Lucy Ricardo’s maiden name.”

“Oh yeah, you love _I Love Lucy_ ,” Dean says.

“I…I picked the name when I was younger. My dad always told me to switch up the names, but that was kind of my default.”

“Our dad knew?” Sam asks softly. He picked up on what I didn’t have to say.

I nod and open the letter. _“324 DIVONNE RD., MANNING, COLORADO STOP. ROOM 4 STOP. JULY 29 TH STOP.”_

“That’s tomorrow,” Dean says.

I nod. “We’d better get ready.”

We pack up the Impala with everything we won’t need for the night, and we’ll leave at daybreak. It will take us a few hours to get down the mountain.

“How did Dad know we’d be at Elkins’ cabin?” Sam asks over a dinner of cold canned stew.

“He’s just good,” I admit.

“That, and we learned from him,” Dean adds. “He probably knew where we’d go before we did.”

Sam tosses his can and spoon to the side with a bit of annoyance. “I just don’t get it.”

“What?” I ask.

“Why all the secrets, how he expects us to follow him without question. He keeps us on some crap need-to-know deal, and I’m tired of it. The last we heard from him, it was too dangerous to be together. So why is he summoning us now?”

“He does what he does for a reason,” Dean says, echoing his words from our first day here.

“What reason?” Sam asks emphatically.

“Our job. You know that. There’s no margin for error, especially now. That’s just the way the old man runs things.”

Sam narrows his eyes at his brother, then glances at me for back-up. I quickly look down at my spoon and Sam sighs agitatedly. “Maybe that worked when we were kids, but not anymore, all right? Not after everything we’ve been through.” Dean opens his mouth but Sam cuts him off. “I mean, are you telling me you’re cool with just falling into line, letting him run the whole show?”

Dean stares at Sam for a long time. “If that’s what it takes,” he finally says.

Sam thinks this over for a few moments while grinding his teeth. Then, without a word, he gets up and stomps to the bedroom. He attempts to slam the broken door shut in an act of defiance, but it just swings back open. He angrily piles a bunch of crap behind the door so it stays closed.

“I guess it’s his turn for the bed,” I say woefully.

The next morning, Sam takes the back seat and doesn’t speak a word to Dean the entire drive. He’ll talk to me if he has to. Dean and I argue quietly about what to listen to for the first ten minutes or so. He finally had time to get the REO Speedwagon tape out of the cassette player, but he still tries to pull the ‘shotgun shuts his cakehole’ card after all this time. I feel like I’ve paid my dues, I should have more of a say. But the more I resist his denial of my requests the worse his choices become, so I give up mainly so we won’t have to listen to the stray Enya cassette tape left over from John’s days.

We arrive at the Silver Spruce Inn just after ten in the morning. John’s black truck is parked outside room four. We go up to the door and knock. It takes John close to a minute to open it. When he finally lets us in, I get a flashback to the motel room in Jericho.

“You’ve been busy,” I say as I step gingerly around the room. The walls are covered with information on the demon. Weather charts, hieroglyphics, pictures, newspaper articles, written notes. Books of all shapes and sizes are piled around, some open on their spines.

John takes a seat behind a paper-strewn desk with the Colt laid out before him. “Well, this is it. This is everything I know about the demon. Everything I’ve learned over the years, everything Mark taught me and helped with.” I meet John’s gaze and find the resolve to hold it. My dad helped John start this, but I’ll help him end it.

From the back of the room, Sam huffs loudly. He looks incredibly pissed off. “Quit the theatrics, Dad. What’s the big fucking deal about this whole thing?”

John clenches his jaw, like he’s trying to fight back telling his son off for language. “What do you mean?”

Annoyed, Sam looks to the ceiling briefly. “Last time we saw you, you said it was too dangerous for us to be together. Now out of the blue you need our help?”

“It still is too dangerous for us to be together but I don’t have any other choice,” John says, matching Sam’s tone.

“So it’s only what _you_ think is best now, huh, Dad? Only what you think is important enough to stay together over? Not your grown sons who can make decisions for themselves, protect themselves?”

Dean turns to place a hand on his brother’s chest as he steps forward. “Sammy, stop it.”

“No, Dean.” Sam shoves his hand off. “You can’t treat us like this anymore, Dad.”

“Like what?” John asks.

“Like children!”

“You are my children. I’m trying to keep you safe. Including Harley.”

Dean hangs his head. “Okay, all due respect, but that’s a bunch of crap.”

John blinks a few times. “Excuse me?”

Dean doesn’t waver. “You know what we’ve been hunting. Hell, you sent us on a few hunting trips yourself. You sent Harley to a dangerous haunted insane asylum _alone!_ You can’t be that worried about keeping us safe.”

“It’s not the same thing, Dean,” John says.

“Then what is it? Why do you want us out of the big fight?” Sam demands. I forget how terrifying he can be when he’s angry. He’s both taller and broader than his dad and full of a lifetime’s worth of pent up rage.

“This demon? It’s a bad son of a bitch. I can’t make the same moves if I’m worried about keeping you alive.”

“You mean you can’t be as reckless,” I say.

John stares at me. I get the strange feeling he’s seeing my dad. In the silence, Sam scoffs.

“This is why I left in the first place,” he mutters.

John rounds on Sam. “What did you say?”

“You heard me,” Sam says, louder.

John strides forward and yells in Sam’s face, “ _You_ walked away!”

“Stop it, both of you,” Dean says while holding Sam back. He’s more worried about the damage Sam can do.

“You’re the one who said don’t come back, Dad!” Sam yells, pointing over Dean’s shoulder. “You closed that door, not me! You were just pissed off that you couldn’t control me anymore!”

John moves forward but I step between him and Sam and scream at the top of my lungs, “Stop it! That’s enough!” The three of them stare at me, speechless, but at least I got them to shut up. “This isn’t helping anything. You guys can’t keep holding grudges against each other and fighting each other when you’re trying to hunt down a fucking demon!”

Sam turns away, brooding, and John and Dean both take a moment to deflate.

“Look…” John sighs heavily. “I don’t expect to make it out of this fight in once piece. Mary’s death…it almost killed me. I can’t watch my children die, too. I won’t.”

“And what happens if you die?” Dean asks. “Dad, what happens if you die and we could’ve done something about it?”

John’s eyes shine in the dim light as he looks from Dean to Sam and to me. I can’t imagine what he thinks. He’s seen us all grow up, become who we are now. I wonder if he wishes it were any different. Even if Mary had to die, if he knew the hunt would take this long, would he have treated his boys better? My dad had a similar battle to fight, but he raised me as an equal, not as a soldier.

Does any of that matter now? It’s obvious John can’t do this alone. And he’s so close to the end. He needs help but he’s too afraid to ask, because the only people he has left are us.

“I think…” I scratch my head. “I think Sam was right back in Chicago. We should do this together.”

“We’re stronger as a family, Dad,” Dean says. “We just are. You know it. So whatever you called us here for, let us help. And wherever it leads us, let us help with that, too.”

John puts his hands on his hips, contemplating Dean’s words. His face is hard, expressionless, for a long time. Finally he scoffs, but it’s with a slight grin of surrender, like he was stupid to fight it for so long. “Our whole lives we’ve been searching for this demon, right?”

“Yeah, but we found out it was a demon only four years ago,” Dean says.

“Yeah, thanks to Harley,” John says with a little half grin. I offer a small smile, because I remember that night at the bar in Arkansas. “It took almost another two years to find out about the yellow-eyed demon, though.”

“That’s when you took off,” Dean says.

“Yeah. With all those omens in Wyoming, I figured the demon must have come out of hiding, or hibernation. And I picked up a trail.” John shuffles through some papers. “It starts in Arizona. Then New Jersey, California. Houses burned down to the ground.”

“We looked into fires,” I say. “We didn’t find anything.”

“That’s because we were looking at the individual fires. Not the victims. It’s going after families, just like it went after us.”

“Families with infants?”

All heads turn to Sam. I’m surprised to hear him speak so soon, and so calmly.

“Yeah,” John says softly. “The night of the kid’s six month birthday.”

“I was six months old that night?” Sam asks. 

“Yes. Exactly six months.”

Sam pushes himself off the counter. “So basically, this demon is going after these kids for some reason, the same way it came for me?” His words become faster, more heated. “So Mom’s death…and Jessica, it’s all because of me?”

“We don’t know that, Sam,” I say gently.

“Oh, really? Because I’d say we’re pretty damn sure, Harley!” Sam yells as he takes a step forward.

Instantly, Dean moves to block Sam’s advance. I don’t think Sam would ever intentionally hurt me, physically at least, but Dean isn’t so easy to believe.

“For the last time, what happened to them was not your fault!” Dean shouts.

“Right, it’s not my fault, but it’s my problem!” Sam shouts right back.

John rises to his feet. “Okay, that’s enough!”

The boys stop arguing and the tension slowly dissipates. Dean and I share a look, but I know what he wants to say. I shake my head slightly.

“So…” I look around the room. “Why’s the demon doing it? What does he want?”

“I don’t know.” John sits back down and rubs his tired eyes. “I’ve always been one step behind it. I’ve never gotten there in time to save…” His voice trails off.

“All right, so how do we find it before it hits again?” Dean asks.

“There’s signs,” John says. “It took me a while to see the pattern, but it’s there. In the days before the fires, signs crop up in the area. Cattle deaths, temperature fluctuations, electrical storms. And then I went back and checked, and…”

“These things happened in Lawrence,” Dean finishes.

John nods. “A week before your mother died.” He turns to Sam. “And in Palo Alto…before Jessica. But these signs…they’re starting again.”

“Where?” Sam demands.

“Salvation, Iowa.”

The four of us exchange knowing glances. We know what we have to do.

While John and Dean tear apart the motel room and pack away John’s stuff, Sam and I start the research. In the state of Iowa, birth records aren’t public information. Birth records haven’t been integrated from paper to online, either, so that means we’ll have to physically check each document, wherever they may be. That leaves us with medical buildings and the public records office.

Sam, Dean and I wait by the cars while John brings out the last of his belongings and shuts the motel door. He turns and briefly appraises the Impala with narrowed eyes, then shoves his bag at his oldest son. “Hey, Dean, why don’t you touch up your car before you get rust? I wouldn’t have given you the damn thing if I thought you were going to ruin it.” He then gets in his truck and starts the engine.

Dean grimaces knowingly. I share a look with Sam, and we both try not to smirk. Then we all get in the Impala and follow John to Iowa.

It’s a ten hour drive to Salvation. We’ll make it by nightfall but will have to wait until morning to do any work. That little bit of delay seems to really bother Sam. He sits in the back seat, his back straight, knees together, staring out the window, like he expects to jump out of the car and save any infants in danger as soon as the car rolls to a stop.

Two hours away from our destination, John jerks his truck off the two lane highway and stops on a muddy shoulder. Dean parks behind him and we get out of the car as John strikes the bed of the truck and yells, “Son of a bitch!”

“Dad, what is it?” Dean asks. John leans on his hands against the truck, shakes his head. “Dad!”

“I just got a call from Caleb.”

“Buckner?” I say, suddenly worried. “Is he okay?”

“He’s fine.” John stands straight and turns to us. “Jim Murphy’s dead.”

Sam’s head jerks up. “Pastor Jim? How?”

“His throat was slashed. He bled out. Caleb said they found traces of sulfur at Jim’s place.”

“A demon,” I say.

“ _The_ demon?” Dean says.

John shrugs helplessly. “I don’t know. Could be he just got careless, slipped up. Maybe the demon knows we’re getting close.”

“What do we do?” Dean asks.

“Now we act like every second counts.” John pulls open the driver’s side door and pauses. “This ends, now. I’m ending it. I don’t care what it takes.” He gets in his truck and drives off. The three of us share a look before following suit.

“He’s not usually so emotional,” Dean says quietly when we’re back on the road.

“Demons are picking off his friends,” I say. “It’s not long before they get to us.”

Dean takes his eyes off the road for a moment to give me a solemn look.

John knocks on our motel door before the sun the following morning. Dean rolls out of bed, grumbling the entire time he stumbles to let him in. John makes his way to the table and sets a small file down.

“We’ll need to split up and cover more ground,” he says.

“Morning to you, too,” Dean says through a yawn.

“Sam and Harley, you found two hospitals, a health center, and the public records office in this county. We each take one location. I want records. I want a list of every infant that’s going to be six months old in the next week.”

I rub my hands over my face. “The public records office will have the records of the kids, too. Why not just search there?”

“The public records office won’t have birth certificates, but it will tell you who moved to Salvation recently.” John flips open his folder. “We’ll cross reference the list of families against people who gave birth here six months ago. We’ll cover every infant in this damn city.”

“But that could still be dozens of kids,” Sam says. “How do we know which one is the right one?”

“We check them all, that’s how. You got any better ideas?”

Sam shakes his head. “No, sir.”

“Get up and get ready. I want us at the doors of each place as soon as they open.” John gets up and leaves the room.

Fifteen minutes later, Dean and Sam drive off towards the east side of town. Sam has Salvation Medical Center, which is within walking distance to the motel but John insisted on Dean driving him, and Dean has St. Francis Hospital. John drops me off at Salvation Children’s Hospital while he goes to the public records office.

It’s a long, grueling day. When I finish with the medical records of 86 babies and leave with a list a whopping four names long, I think it must be well after dark. Imagine my surprise when I walk out of the hospital and find it’s a little after noon. I yawn and stretch, and decide to walk towards the public records office to get some blood flow back to my legs.

John and I are first back to the motel. Dean arrives not long after. We wait on Sam nearly a half-hour more, and when he finally shows up, he doesn’t look so good. He falls heavily into a chair and rubs his temples. Uh-oh. We know that sign.

“What happened, Sam?” I ask.

“Another…vision.” He looks sheepishly at John. “I went and found the house. It was near a train. Not many train tracks in Salvation. I talked the couple. They have a six month old daughter.”

John’s mouth opens a fraction of an inch. “A vision,” he says flatly.

“Yes.” Sam grimaces. “I saw the demon burning that woman on the ceiling.”

“And you think this is going to happen to the woman you met because…”

“Because these things happen exactly the way I see them.”

“It started out as nightmares,” I say.

“Then it started happening when he was awake,” Dean adds.

Sam winces and finally sits straight up. “It’s like the closer I get to anything to do with the demon, the stronger the visions get.”

“All right,” John says, irritated. “When were you going to tell me about this?”

The three of us exchange hesitant glances.

“We didn’t know what it meant,” Dean finally says.

“Okay, but if something like this starts happening to your brother, you pick up the phone and you call me,” John says commandingly.

The room goes silent, broken only by the sound of Dean agitatedly tossing the empty coffee carton back on the counter. He takes a few long strides toward his father, his eyes narrowed.

“Call you?” he repeats. “Are you kidding me? Dad, I called you from Lawrence, all right? Sam called you when I was _dying_. I mean, getting you on the phone? I got a better chance of winning the lottery.”

John nods knowingly. “You’re right. Although I’m not too crazy about this new tone of yours, you’re right. I’m sorry.”

Dean glances at me. I give him a little smile of support.

“Look, guys, vision or no vision, fact is, we know the demon is coming tonight,” Sam says. “And that family’s going to go through the same hell we went through.”

“No they’re not,” John says determinedly. “No one is, ever again.”

A ringing phone ruins the moment. None of the boys move, which makes me finally realize that it’s _my_ phone. What the hell? The only three people I ever talk to are sitting in this room.

“Harley, are you gonna answer it?” Sam asks.

“Huh? Oh, yeah.” I dig out my phone. I don’t recognize the number. “Hello?”

_“Hiya, Harley. Back in the land of the living, I see.”_

I sit up straighter. That voice. That annoying, smug, know-it-all voice…Holy freaking shit. “Unfortunately, I _can_ say the same about you.” Dean throws me an inquisitive look. I put the phone on speaker.

_“You’re a hard person to get ahold of. You must have learned your hiding skills from daddy.”_

Sam and Dean spring to their feet when they recognize Meg’s voice, and they look livid.

“And who did you learn your flying skills from? How’s your spine, by the way?”

_“Doing a whole lot better than Sarah Carter’s, thanks for asking.”_

A pit drops in my stomach and bile rises in my throat. “What did you do to her?”

_“Not much, unfortunately. All I had to do was threaten to remove her vertebrae one by one, and she told me everything I needed to know. Including your phone number. But I removed her spine anyway, because I was so looking forward to it.”_

“What the fuck do you want?” I yell.

_“I want to talk to your surrogate father.”_

I stay quiet, look at the boys. What the hell do I say to that? I can play stupid.

_“Let me talk to John, little Lee.”_

“I don’t know where he is,” I say.

_“You may know how to get off the grid for a while, buy you’re a terrible liar.”_

Dean makes a perceptive face and shrugs, because she’s not wrong.

_“It’s time for the grown-ups to talk, Harley. Give him the phone.”_

John comes over and gestures for the phone. I reluctantly hand it over. The first thing he does is take it off speaker, which irritates all three of us.

“This is John.”

He’s silent for a long time. Listening, thinking. But then his face drains of color as he sits down on the bed. What did she tell him?

“I’m here,” he says meekly. Meg spews more bullshit, and then John’s head shoots up. “Caleb?....You listen to me, you crazy bitch. He’s got nothing to do with anything. You let him go!...I don’t know what you’re talking about….Caleb! Caleb!”

“Dad?” Dean says quietly. We’re all on our feet now, hanging on his every word.

“I’m gonna kill you, you know that?” John says through gritted teeth. After a very long moment of more listening and thinking, he continues. “Okay….I said okay, I’ll bring you the Colt.”

My eyes widen and I open my mouth to protest, but Dean grabs my shoulders.

“It’s gonna take me about a days’ drive to get there….That’s impossible. I can’t get there in time and I can’t just carry a gun on a plane.”

Meg says her final words and John hangs up the phone.

“Okay, _what_ the hell,” I snap. He’s going to hand over the Colt, just like that?

“Um…” John runs his hands through his hair. “Meg’s a demon. She knows Mark and Harley had the Colt, and she was fairly certain they gave it to me and she sure as hell knows why. As far as Meg’s concerned, that means war. She killed Jim, then she…” John lets out an aggravated breath. “She killed Caleb just now. Harley, she killed Sarah and Jack. She’s killing our friends until we give up the gun.”

My legs seem to lose strength and I sit down on the bed next to John with so much momentum I bounce a bit. I called Sarah Carter and Jack Winston years ago when I was looking for confirmation of the Colt legend. Did those phone calls seal their fate, or would Meg have found them somehow, regardless, because they were my friends?

“What do we do?” Dean asks.

“I’m going to Lincoln,” John says.

“What? Why?” I ask.

“It doesn’t look like we have a choice. If I don’t go, a lot of people die. Our friends die.”

“Dad, the demon is coming tonight for Monica and her family,” Sam says. “That gun is all we’ve got. You can’t just hand it over.”

“Who said anything about handing it over?” John offers a sly grin. “Beside us, who’s really seen the gun? No one knows what it looks like.”

“That’s true,” I say. “The demon that killed my dad, he didn’t even know the Colt was a gun. He just knew it was a weapon.”

“So, what?” Dean says to John. “You’re just going to pick up a ringer at a pawn shop?”

John shrugs. “Antique store.”

“You’re going to hand Meg a fake gun and hope she doesn’t notice?” Dean says cynically.

“Look, as long as it’s close, she shouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”

“Yeah, but for how long? What happens when she figures it out?”

“I just…” John lets out a sigh. “I just need to buy a few hours, that’s all.”

“You mean for us,” Sam says. “You want us to stay here and kill this demon by ourselves?”

“No.” John looks sadly at me, and squeezes my hand. “I want to stop losing people we love.” He turns to Sam. “I want you to go to school. I want Dean to have a home. I want…” John stands up and paces a few strides. “I want Mary alive. It’s just…I want this to be over.”

“I’ll do it,” I say. “I’ll take the fake gun to Meg.”

Dean shakes his head before I finish my sentence. “No, Harley, that’s crazy.”

“Does Meg want John or does Meg want what he has? If she’s just after the Colt itself who cares who delivers the package?”

“She’s got a point, Dean,” John acknowledges gently.

“You know it’s a trap, right? I’m not going to let you go off on your own to make a deal with a demon. One where you’re _not_ holding any cards.” Dean places his hand on the side of my neck, tilting my head upward. “I’ll come with you.”

“Dean…” I place my hand on top of his and gently pull it away. “I offered to go so that you guys will get the chance to finish what you started. Tonight’s the night you’ve been waiting for for so many years. Part of me has been waiting for it, too. I’ve been in this fight as well, because of my dad. Let me help.”

“Harley.” John says my name as if I’m a gift he doesn’t deserve. “I appreciate everything you’ve done for my family. But I won’t let you put yourself at risk for us. Not without backup.”

“I already offered to go,” Dean points out crossly.

“I know, and now _I’m_ offering.” John turns to his boys. “It’s up to you to take care of the demon tonight. I know you can handle it. It’s your fight now.”

Dean nods once, ever acquiescent. John takes the Colt from his pocket, which he has it on his person at all times, and hands it to his oldest son.

“There’s four bullets left. Now, that seems like plenty, and I know I’ve taught you better than to waste more than one bullet, but we’ve never had a weapon like this before. The bullets are special. Once we use them, we can’t get more. So shoot straight, shoot true.”

Dean holds the Colt delicately, like it’s made of glass. He looks up to his dad, then worriedly at me. “Just promise me something. Both of you.” John and I listen keenly. “If this thing goes south, just…get the hell out. Don’t get yourself killed. You’re no good to us dead.”

I nudge his arm. “Same goes for you.”

His voice is low and thick when he says, “I’m serious, Harley.”

“I know, Dean.”

The silence that comes next is unlike any I’ve ever felt before. We’re going into battle, getting ready for the big fight, and we all know there will most likely be casualties. This could be the last time I see Sam or Dean. The last time they see me. Everything can and will change after tonight, we just don’t know to what degree.

The road flies by as we drive down highway 80. I ride shotgun in John’s truck, holding the antique store Colt on my lap. I get a sickly déjà vu feeling to three years ago. Dad and I had just left Elkins’ cabin. I sat with the Colt case on my lap, bubbling with excitement over my latest accomplishment. Little did I know it was about to be the end of everything.

“I don’t think I’ve had quality time with you in ages, Harley,” John says in a tone I’m supposed to find comforting, but it’s obviously awkward for the both of us.

“Last time we did we were in Lake Manitoc, and you called me out on my jealousy over Dean flirting with other girls.”

John chuckles uneasily. “I remember that.”

“Mmm.”

“Seems like you guys have come a long way since then.”

Hmm. Now that seemed sincere. I chance a glance at John. He taps lightly on the steering wheel to the song on the radio. Looks at the view as it passes by. So like Dean. Does it mean he approves?

“I’m glad it has. At least one thing has gone right since this all started,” I say softly.

John sighs. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about your dad, Harley. That I wish it never happened. He’s a name on a long list of people I’ve let down over the years.”

“I never understood why you were doing what you were doing until he died,” I say. “If I hadn’t had the privilege of murdering his killer, the act of needing to do so would consume me.”

With a solemn nod, he says, “I’m not proud of the way I let it consume me. Of what I’ve done to my boys. But Mary was the love of my life.”

“I know. I – I read your journal. Sam and Dean pretend they don’t see what you’ve written. They act like the supernatural information is all that’s there. But I read it all. I…understand.”

John stays silent. I turn my head to look out of the window but I don’t see what’s beyond. Finally, I admit something I’ve never once said out loud in a voice no higher than a whisper.

“I miss him so much.”

It takes John a moment to respond. A silence filled with what, regret? Guilt? Does he know that I don’t blame him for my dad’s death?

“I miss him too, Harley.”

We cross the border of Iowa and Nebraska before sundown. John told Meg it would take him about a day to get there. In the moment I assumed it meant drive time until I remembered how close the two states were. We needed time to get a fake Colt, that’s for sure, but what are we going to do there so early? I ask him.

“I wanted to get there before midnight to scope the place out,” John explains. “See what kind of demon booby traps we can set.”

“How far out are we?”

John glances at the speedometer and the clock. “We probably have another two hours.”

I nod and lean my head back against the seat.

Two hours later, nearly to the minute, we roll up to an abandoned warehouse in Lincoln, Nebraska. John parks around the corner and we backtrack to the warehouse. It’s relatively small, but inside is wide open, save for the old broken down crates in one corner. Not a lot of places to hide out.

“Okay, what kind of booby traps are you thinking?” I ask when we arrive back at the front. “Devil’s Traps? Iron weapons? Salt?

John shakes his head, then gestures to walk back to the truck. “There aren’t any good places to hide a Devil’s Trap. Meg would know what she’s walking into, and I’m sure she’d be expecting it. We can’t get enough salt to cover the entire warehouse. I’ve got a couple of iron knives but that’s like giving them a papercut. I think I know our best bet.” He unlocks the bed of the truck and lowers the tailgate. Under the Tonneau cover is a hidden weapons compartment that automatically slides out and opens up to reveal its treasure.

“Now that’s some Batman-level shit,” I say with a grin.

With a small huff of a laugh, John selects one small item. A rosary.

“Um…” I falter. “We’re going to…pray?”

“Did you see the water tower on the first story landing of the warehouse?”

“Yeah.”

“The pipes run down, then west, following the alley into the sub-basement. If we find the boiler room, we can use the pipes around it to our advantage if we need an escape.”

“With…holy water,” I say. “It’s genius.”

“Have you made holy water before?” John asks.

“No.”

“But you’ve read my journal.”

I nod. “It’s a long process. I still copied it down.”

“Good. Put it to use.”

I stare at the rosary he presses into my open palm. “John, this is kind of important. I don’t think I should bless the water. What if I mess it up?”

He lays a comforting hand on my shoulder, much like he had in Chicago. An almost fatherly touch. “You won’t, Harley. I promise.” I look up into his dark eyes shimmering in the moonlight. “How about we go over the Latin?” I nod and step away before my eyes fill with tears.

We work on the three sections of making holy water. Invocation, addressing the water, consecration. I’ll have to read straight from my journal because it’s long and complicated. John says the invocation is the most important part. It’s asking the spirits to come to your aid, telling them that what you’re about to do is in the name of God. If you do it wrong, you’ll just be talking out your ass at the water.

It looks like I’ll need fifteen minutes to complete the ritual. It’s a half-hour to midnight. John drives back to the warehouse but parks in front this time.

“Remember,” he says before we exit the car. “Take your time, speak clearly, and make sure the rosary is submerged in the water. If you do it right, any water that filters in and out of that tower is considered blessed.”

“Okay.” I nod a couple of times. Rub my hands together. “I got this.”

“Don’t mess up, because our lives depend on it if things go to hell.”

I reach over to smack his shoulder with the backside of my hand but he’s already cowering away, arms raised, laughing. “I’m trying to psych myself _up,_ not down!”

“You’ll be fine. Get going. That water tower is also your hideout until I go inside. Then make your way to the sub-basement and wait by the hatch.”

I get out of the truck. Before I close the door, I stare at John for a long moment. “Be careful.”

John nods. “You too, kid.”

While John waits for midnight, I walk over to the ladder leading to the first story roof. After checking that the coast is clear – and double-checking that I have my journal and the rosary with me in my bag – I make a quiet ascent.

That went smoothly, but scaling the water tower won’t be. It’s rickety and the ladder rungs are loose and I feel like I’m going to knock it over if I put my weight against it. But I’ve got to do this. I take a deep breath, place my foot on the bottom rung, and climb.

The top of the water tower has a locked door, but the lock breaks easily when I shove my knife at it. As quietly as I can I open the squeaky door and peer inside. Then I groan.

John said I have to submerge the rosary in the water as I speak. Well, the tank is only halfway full. I have a long way to bend over to reach the top of the water. Ok. First things first. Start the invocation.

I open my journal to the bookmarked page. _“Exorciso te creaturam salis, per Deum vivum, et per Deum, et verum, et per Deum sanctum, et per Deum qui te per Elizeum prophetam in aquam mitti jussit, ut sanaretur sterilitas aque, ut efficiaris sal exorcisatus in salute credentium; ut sis omnibus te sumentibus sanitas anime et corporis, et effugiat at que disecedat ab eo loco, qui asperses fuerit omnis phantasia et nequitia, vel versutia diabolice fraudis, omnisq; spiritus immundus, adjuratus per eum, qui venturus est judicare vivos et mortuos, et speculum per ignem, Amen.”_

Something catches the corner of my eye. I look up and see Meg at the far end of the alley, towards the back of the warehouse. I slip down a few rungs. Shit. The deal’s going to go down and I’m only halfway through the first part!

_“Oremus,”_ I say with a deep, peaceful sigh, and continue. _“Immensam clementiam tuam, omnipotens ceterne Deus, humiliter imploramus, ut hanc creaturam salis, quam in usum generis humani tribuisti…”_

Finally, it’s time to hang the upper half of my body over the edge of the tank. Before I do, I take one last look at John’s truck. He stands next to it, staring at the warehouse. Then he raises his head to the water tower. When he sees me looking at him, he nods. I nod back.

The brim of the tank is thin and digs into my stomach as I lean over. I try to scoot forward so my pelvis braces against it instead. It’s more bearable. This next part has to be done in about a minute, because I need to get off this roof. Thank God it’s the shortest. I balance the journal on one hand and dunk the rosary with the other and begin the consecration.

I stop for a breather somewhere around the poisonous serpent. Fuck, Latin is hard, especially when you’re upside down. Ok, keep going. _“…et presentia sancti spiritus nobis misericordiam tuam poscentibus ubiq; adesse dignetur, per Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate spiritus sancti Deus per omnia secula seculorum, Amen.”_ With some satisfaction, I drop the rosary in the tank and get the hell off the water tower.

The meeting is underway when I reach the hatch through the back entrance. Above me is a small room, and through it is the warehouse. I can just barely hear John say, “If I give you the gun, how do I get out of here?”

“If you’re as good as they say you are I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”

Ugh. Something about Meg’s voice invokes an unusual amount of rage inside me.

“Maybe I’ll just shoot you,” John suggests lightly.

“You want to shoot me, baby? Go ahead. There’s plenty more where I came from.”

After a long pause, John exclaims, “Who the hell’s that?”

“He’s the demon that’s been keeping an eye on you and your boys for two decades. But he’s not nearly as much fun as I am, I can tell you that.”

John doesn’t answer. I imagine him staring down the second demon, wishing he had the real Colt so he could toast the both of them on the spot.

“Give us the Colt, John,” Meg demands. “Now!”

He must have done so because Meg says, in a rather disappointed voice, “This is the Colt?” Then, quieter, possibly to her counterpart: “What do you think?”

Instead of a verbal response, the gun cocks and a shot goes off. I almost burst through the hatch to kick some demon ass for shooting John, but thankfully I realize that would be stupid and pointless because Meg says in appalled disgust: “You shot me! I can’t believe you just shot me!”

“It’s a fake,” the male demon says. Seconds later, the antique store Colt clatters to the ground.

“You’re so dead, John. Your boys are dead. That bitch that follows your family around like a puppy dog is dead.”

“I’ve never used the gun,” John says, sounding strangely calm. “How could I know it wouldn’t work?”

“I’m so not in the mood for this,” Meg growls. “You got the gun from Harley, she used the gun to kill my brother, so I’m pretty fucking sure she told you what it can do!”

All right, bitch. It’s my turn. Time to get John the hell out of there. To my left are pipes running the length of the wall, and a large gate valve next to a steam gage. Hmm. Holy steam, anyone?

I turn the valve until steam hisses loudly somewhere overhead. Moments later the door above me slams shut and locks, then the hatch opens.

“Perfect timing, Harley,” John says as he passes me. We jog down the alley sub-basement towards what was supposed to be Phase 1 of the escape plan, but thanks to the holy steam is now Phase 2. We reach the end as Meg and her buddy burst through the hatch.

John turns a valve and water gushes from a pipe halfway up the wall and crosses the floor in front of the demons. They smirk at each other, because why should water hurt them? I just hope I did the ritual correctly. The male demon walks forward confidently, but the longer he makes contact with the water, the more his body steams. He yelps in pain and jumps back. I sigh in relief.

“Holy water, real cute,” Meg sneers.

“Beginners luck, huh?” I say with a grin, and John and I take off.

“That won’t hold them for long.” John holds a door open for me and we reach the outside. “We have to get to the truck before they make it back around through the warehouse.”

Well, we reach the truck before the demons, but all four tires have been slashed.

“Damn it!” John grabs my arm. “Come on, let’s go.”

We take off running. The warehouses have a maze of alleys that could provide escape if we find the right one. We just don’t have time to make a mistake. John makes the next left and gets halfway down the alley before he stops, gasping for breath. I just think he’s tired until I look up ahead: we’ve reached a dead end.

“What do we do, John?” I ask. “We can’t escape them on foot.”

John regards me with an incredibly solemn look, trying to convey every emotion he can’t put into words. Apologies, regret, guilt. I nod my head once, understanding.

The demons arrive at the end of the alley. I take a deep breath and close my eyes. There’s no escape. There’s nothing we can do.

Finally, I’m going to die.

¨ ¨ ¨

Ibris can see her target. Her new meatsuit, waiting unconscious in an alley. In a few seconds she won’t be Ibris anymore. As she gets closer, though, she realizes the vessel disgusts her.

“Ugh.” She gets to her feet and scrutinizes her outfit. “No sense of style. What is this? Plaid?”

“I think it’s cute,” Meg teases. “Makes you look like a lumberjack in leather.”

“What’s her name?”

“Harley.”

“Ugh,” she says again. “Seriously?”

Meg scowls. “Why can’t you figure out her name? Everything should be there.”

“It is, but…it’s weird.” Harley closes her eyes and concentrates. “It’s all buried deep. It’s going to take some work to learn about her.”

“Must be rusty,” Tom says, bored. “Been too long since you’ve left Hell.”

Harley sneers at him. “Not everyone can be Azazel’s favorites and come and go as they please.”

“Okay, enough,” Meg snaps. She bends down to retrieve the cell phone from the male human’s pocket. The name comes to Harley: John. “We need to move. John had a fake gun, which means his boys have the real Colt. They’re in Salvation, trying to kill Azazel.” She laughs maliciously. “As if. But they won’t stay there long. Oh, look. John has a few missed calls. Let’s have some fun.”

Meg dials a number and puts the phone to her ear. “You boys really screwed up this time….You’re never going to see your father or your girlfriend again.” She hangs up.

“This seems like a hell of a lot of effort to find where they’re going,” Harley says. “Can’t you just track them like you’ve been doing?”

“We’re demons, not hellhounds. And we’re pressed for time. Azazel wants the Colt _now_. I won’t take any more chances.”

The phone in Harley’s bag rings. She composes herself before answering. “H-hello?”

_“Harley? Where are you? What happened?”_

“I – I don’t know. They took John and then they left me in an alley.”

_“Are you okay? Are you hurt?”_

“No, I’m fine…but they’re pissed. They’re coming after you.”

_“We need to meet up and lay low. Figure out a game plan. I’m thinking Bobby’s.”_

“They slashed the truck tires. I need to find a car.”

_“Okay, just hurry. And be careful!”_

Harley hangs up the phone and sighs. “Was that good enough?” she asks mockingly.

“Perfect,” Meg says with a wide grin. “God, I never realized how whiney she is.”

“I know. She thinks she’s so tough.” Harley closes her eyes and searches inside for the information she needs. Tom was right. It _has_ been a while since she possessed someone. But she doesn’t remember it being difficult to access their memories. Harley’s eyes pop open. “Oh!”

“What is it?” Meg asks.

Harley smiles wickedly. “She’s pregnant.”

Meg raises an eyebrow. “Interesting. And the location?”

“Sioux Falls, South Dakota.”

“Let’s move,” Meg says. “Tom, take John. You know where to go.”

Tom nods. He easily lifts John’s body over his shoulder like he was carrying a sack of flour and heads down the alley. Meg and Harley follow.

At daybreak, when Harley and Meg arrive at the dingy Singer Salvage Yard, the distinguishable Winchester car is already parked beside the rundown house. Meg kills the engine and looks to her fellow demon.

“You don’t look like you were attacked,” she says with obvious gratification.

Harley rolls her eyes. “So what, are you going to beat me up?”

Meg clocks Harley right in the cheekbone, drawing a speck of blood. “Yes.”

“Ow, you cunt!”

“We have to make it believable.”

“It _is_ ,” Harley snarls. “I can fake internal injuries. Give me a knife, I’ll rip up parts of her clothes. They’re hideous anyway.”

After Meg deems Harley presentable, they get out of the car and Harley takes the wheel. She drives closer to the house and parks next to an old tow truck with a Rottweiler napping on the hood. As soon as she gets out, the dog senses what she is and barks its head off. Harley resists the urge to bark back at it. If it weren’t chained up and it charged her, the beast would most certainly be dead.

The one good thing about the barking is it announced her arrival. The front door bangs open and a man runs out to her. The name comes to Harley much quicker than anything else had: Dean.

 _Hmm, looks like someone’s waking up,_ Harley thinks. _You just stay buried. I’ve got business to attend to. Mostly professional, but don’t think I’m not considering fucking your boyfriend._

“Harley!” Dean wraps his firm arms around her, then tenderly touches her wounded cheek. He’s too distraught to realize it’s only minutes old. “I’m gonna kill that bitch, I swear.”

 _Yes, we’ve heard that before._ “It’s okay, Dean. Let’s go inside.”

Dean tries to direct her towards the couch in the extremely cluttered adjacent room, where the other hot brother and an old man wait, but something inside her makes her question the location. The girl’s soul stirs – she _really_ wants to enter that room. Harley doesn’t question it – she avoids it. She feigns weakness and manages to make it to the kitchen table, where she falls heavily into a chair. Sam and Bobby enter the room.

“What happened last night?” Dean asks.

Harley rubs her forehead and groans lightly. “I don’t really know. It’s hard to remember. I blacked out for a while. I – I made holy water.”

“What?” Sam sort of chuckles.

“It was John’s idea. Turn the water tower on top of the warehouse into a big vat of holy water. It worked…almost.”

Dean grabs her shoulders. “Where’s Dad?”

Harley stares at Dean’s face. Hmm, he’s definitely a handsome one. Bright green eyes, high cheekbones, a soft face covered in a five o’clock shadow. What does he want with this pathetic meatsuit? “I don’t know.”

“Did they kill him?”

“I don’t know,” Harley says again, slowly, keeping her eyes on her lap. She isn’t distressed enough. She wrings her hands until she gets an idea. “But there was a lot of blood in the alley when I woke up. It wasn’t mine.”

She slowly looks up. Dean exchanges worried glances with Sam and Bobby.

“Did you kill the demon?” Harley asks.

“We…ah, we didn’t get him,” Sam says dejectedly. “He got away.”

_As we figured he would_. “And the Colt?”

“It’s here,” Dean says.

Harley’s eyes dart around the room, inadvertently looking for the gun. She trusts him, for some reason. The gut feeling must come from within. Meg should make her entrance any time. Not a moment too soon, either, because the old man’s been eyeing her weird since she got in.

“You don’t look too good, Harley,” Bobby says. “Why don’t you come lay down.”

In the room that the girl really wants Harley to go into? No, thanks. “I think I’d better stay here. I feel weak.”

“Dean can help you,” Bobby insists.

The ever concerned boyfriend takes a closer look at her. “Yeah, he’s right. Come on.”

Harley has to let herself be half-dragged half-carried into the next room. She steers herself to the couch along the shortest path possible, and the old man doesn’t notice because his dog starts barking again, but worse than when Harley walked by. Then it yelps once, and falls quiet.

“Rumsfeld?” Bobby peeks out the window. “Something’s wrong.”

Just then, the front door opens with a _bang_. In struts Meg like a hurricane after undeniably killing the dog. She surveys the room with a smirk.

The boyfriend slips a flask from his back pocket – holy water, no doubt – and unscrews it with one hand as he lunges toward Meg. She all but rolls her eyes as she strikes him in the chest and sends him flying into a stack of books.

“Dean!” Harley cries. Wait – Dean? Really? That was an instinctive cry. She should have had to remind herself to act concerned.

Meg turns her attention on the two remaining men. The hot brother steps defensively in front of the old man. “No more crap, okay? I want the Colt, Sam. The _real_ Colt. Right now.”

Bobby and Sam begin a slow retreat, obviously afraid. But the girl inside is hopeful. Why?

“We don’t have it on us,” Sam says. “We buried it.”

With a tactful eye roll and a frustrated sigh, Meg saunters forward, forcing the boys to retreat further. “Didn’t I say ‘no more crap’? I swear, after everything I heard about you, I got to tell you I’m a little underwhelmed. I mean, did you really think I wouldn’t find you?”

The boyfriend rises to his feet and towers over Meg. A small flutter of elation blooms inside Harley. The hell is this girl up to? _Stay down,_ Harley orders, and forcibly shoves her under.

“Actually, we were counting on it,” Dean says, and then looks up.

All eyes follow his. Son of a bitch! A Devil’s Trap! And Meg walked right into it.

Dean grins. “Gotcha.” Then, like a rehearsed play, the hot brother swings a chair around and Dean shoves Meg into it, then the old man comes in with ropes and voila, one demon down. Then the old man takes it up a notch and places a salt line on all the doors and windows.

That’s fine. The only demons around are already in the house. But Harley can’t attack yet without the boys giving up the Colt. She wouldn’t mind tearing apart the place brick by brick, but they don’t exactly have much time.

Something stirs inside Harley. She actually _does_ feel weak for some reason. Fading, like a battery slowly dying. She takes a couple of steps back and hits the wall, but no one notices because their focus is on the demon in the trap.

Meg trains a pair of seductive eyes on Sam. “You know, if you wanted to tie me up, all you had to do was ask.”

“Where’s our father, Meg?” Dean demands. Ooh, he’s sexy when he’s mad.

“You didn’t ask very nice,” Meg teases.

Dean narrows his eyes. “Where’s our father, bitch?”

“Jeeze, you kiss your mother with that mouth?” Meg chuckles. “Oh wait, I forgot. You don’t.”

Apparently the mother is an even larger trigger than the father, because Dean lunges at Meg, puts his face in hers and spits, “You think this is a fucking game? Where is he? What did you do to him?”

“He died screaming,” Meg taunts him. “I killed him myself.”

Dean’s nostrils flare as he breathes, like he’s trying to calm himself, but hate burns in his eyes. The anger wins. He lashes out and backhands Meg across the face.

Meg only smiles, offers a small laugh. She can handle so much more than that, and she likes that she gets a rise out of Dean. “He begged for his life, begged for his sons, before I slit his throat.”

Harley gasps a long, raggedy breath, drawing the attention of everyone in the room. She doubles over and falls to her knees. _No,_ she thinks. _Stay down, you bitch! I’m not done with you yet!_

But the girl fights on. “She’s – lying. Don’t…don’t believe her.” She gasps again and grips her head, speaking words she doesn’t want to say. “He’s not dead!”

¨ ¨ ¨

I struggle to the surface, fighting my way back to myself like I’m running through quicksand. So close, but so far. The demon inside me rages with fire, surrounding my soul, dragging me down, down…But I can’t give up. I have to get back. I won’t be like the girl suffering in the chair across from me. I won’t.

Dean turns to me. Sam takes a step forward. But Bobby holds them back. He knows. He knew the moment I walked in the door.

I manage to get two last words out before I succumb to the demon.

_“Help…me…”_

¨ ¨ ¨

Harley lets out a furious yell and shoves the girl down so far she won’t see sunlight for a century. She stands up, dusts off her pants, and faces the crowd.

“Well, sorry about th–”

Something collides with the back of her body and she goes down.

“What…the…hell.” Harley turns over in time to see the old man rolling away from her until he comes to a stop at the couch. She gets to her feet and heads straight for him. “You pathetic sack of–”

She stops. It feels like she walked into glass. She glares at Bobby and makes a lunge for him, but again she’s stopped by an invisible wall.

“You are _so_ useless,” Meg tells her.

Harley looks up. The old man threw her in the Devil’s Trap.

“What the hell is going on?” Dean yells.

“They’re possessed,” Bobby says. “Both of them.”

Dean turns to Harley so quickly he was liable to give himself whiplash. But the fear on his face, the hesitation to run to her…it’s interesting.

“My guess is a demon’s been in Meg for quite some time,” Bobby says. “It’s the only way she could have survived that fall. Harley…it’s hard to say. But I’m pretty sure it’s recent.”

“She said she made holy water,” Sam says. “Could she have done that if she was possessed?”

“Even if she could, why would she want to?” Bobby asks. Sam shrugs.

Dean steps closer to Harley, but not so close as to cross the circle. He stares at her, studies her, like he’s trying to figure out how long she could have been under the influence of a demon and why he didn’t notice it sooner.

“You said he wasn’t dead,” Dean says. “Where is he? Where’s our father?”

Harley just smiles.

“Dean, if they’re possessed…” Sam holds up an old book, his finger marking a page about halfway through. “Think we can get a two for one special?”

“Let’s find out,” Dean says.

“Aw, are you going to read us a story?” Harley asks mockingly.

Dean sneers. “Something like that. Hit it, Sam.”

Sam clears his throat and consults the book. _“Regna terrae, cantate Deo, psallite Domino qui fertis…”_

Harley’s eyes widen while Meg scoffs, “An exorcism? Are you serious?” Why isn’t she more scared?

_“…super caelum caeli ad Orientem. Ecce dabit voci Suae vocem virtutis, tribuite virtutem Deo…”_

Meg flinches in pain while Harley works hard to fight back a grimace. The words cut like papercuts now, but later…

“Oh, we’re going for it,” Dean says smugly. “Head spinning, projectile vomiting, the whole nine yards.”

Harley lets out a quick laugh, then her hands fly to cover her mouth. Meg scowls at her. “I didn’t – that wasn’t–”

Dean winks at Harley. “She’s coming back, baby.”

“I’m going to kill you,” Harley growls. “I’m going to rip the bones from your body!”

“No, you’re gonna burn in Hell,” Dean says matter-of-factly. “Unless you tell us where our dad is.” Meg and Harley exchange a knowing smile. Dean shrugs. “Well, at least you’ll get a nice tan.”

Sam’s voice grows stronger. _“Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus, omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii, omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica…”_

Harley falls to her knees and groans in pain. She didn’t sign up for an exorcism when she agreed to help. She finally got out of Hell, she didn’t want to go back!

“He shed cowardly tears as he begged for his life,” Meg says through her teeth.

_“Ergo draco maledicte et omnis legio diabolica adjuramus te. Cessa decipere humanas creaturas, eisque aeternae Perditionis venenum propinare…”_

“Hmm. Somehow, I just don’t believe you.” Dean thinks for a moment, then glances down at Harley fighting back a scream. He kneels in front of her. “Where is he?”

“Go to Hell!” Harley yells.

“Well, that’s where _you’re_ headed. Tell me where our dad is.”

“You just won’t take _dead_ for an answer, will you?” Meg says.

_“Vade, Satana, inventor et magister omnis fallaciae, hostis humanae salutis. Humiliare sub potenti manu dei, contremisce et effuge, invocato a nobis sancto et terribili nomine, quem inferi tremunt…”_

Dean grabs the front of Harley’s jacket and shakes her violently. “Where is he?”

Harley reaches out and claws at his neck until she gets a good grip around his throat. Even with the pain of the ritual, she manages to cut off his air. “You don’t know what we did to her before we got here. You don’t know if she’ll survive when I leave.”

Dean lets her jacket go and pulls at her fingers, but they’re tightened like vises. “I’d rather see her… _dead_ …than possessed…by a fucking demon,” he gasps.

_“Ab insidiis diaboli, libera nos, Domine. Ut Ecclesiam tuam secura tibi facias libertate servire, te rogamus, audi nos. Ut inimicos sanctae Ecclesiae humiliare digneris, te rogamus, audi nos…”_

The ritual went on longer than Harley thought it would. It’s almost over, and those papercuts are like hot daggers dragging through butter now. Meg may be Azazel’s daughter, Azazel’s favorite, but Harley is nobody, and she failed miserably. Her first time out of Hell in centuries and she tasted freedom for five minutes? Screw the plan. Screw Meg. She’ll give them what they want if it means staying topside.

Her fingers loosen from Dean’s neck. “He’s not dead. But he will be after what we do to him.”

Dean shoves her away and rubs his throat. Holds his hand out to silence his brother. “How do we know you’re telling the truth?”

“You don’t.”

“Sam!” Dean yells.

“A building, okay? A building in Jefferson City.”

“Harley!” Meg hisses. “You fucking coward!”

“I need an address!” Dean shouts.

“And the demon, the one we’re looking for,” Sam says. “Where is it?”

“I don’t know,” Harley says.

“Finish it!” Dean orders his brother.

“I swear, that’s everything!” Harley cries desperately. “That’s all I know.”

Dean looks to his brother. Sam nods.

_“Ut inimicos sanctae Ecclesiae te rogamus, audi nos…”_

“You son of a bitch,” Harley growls. “You promised.”

“I lied!” Dean yells.

“You’re giving up your precious daddy!”

With a sigh, Dean gets to his feet. “We’ll find him. But right now, I’d rather have her.” The brothers exchange a decisive glance before Sam speaks with final authority.

_“Terribilis Deus de sanctuario suo. Deus Israhel ipse truderit virtutem et fortitudinem plebi Suae. Benedictus Deus. Gloria Patri!”_

Both Harley and Meg throw back their heads with a scream as a huge cloud of thick black smoke trails out of their mouths.

¨ ¨ ¨

It doesn’t take long for the demon to leave my body. I feel the evil seep out of my mouth until I fall back on the floor. Not all of it, though. No, I can sense traces of the vile black smoke left behind like ash from a fire.

I didn’t think I would ever get control of myself. I tried, and I fought, harder than I’ve ever done before, but it seemed like everything I did to push the demon aside was equivalent to poking it with a stick. But I am myself now. When I want to turn my head, I turn my head. When I want to sit up, I sit up.

I look around the room and see what remains of my family watching at me apprehensively.

“Dean?” I whisper feebly.

In a moment he kneels beside me and takes my face in his hands. He stares into my eyes for a long time, searching for something. His brows pull together in concern, he takes quick, deep breaths. I realize he’s searching for the demon, as if he doesn’t quite believe it’s truly gone.

“You…should have mentioned…pea soup instead.” I smile weakly.

Dean lets out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a cry of relief and pulls me to his chest. I hold him back as tight as I can.

“You smell like rotten eggs,” Dean says into my hair. I chuckle lightly.

“Bobby, she’s still alive,” Sam says urgently. “Call 911. Dean, I need your help.”

We break apart and find Sam supporting Meg. The real Meg. Just a girl, broken and beaten, a thick trail of blood and saliva spilling out of her mouth. Another person whose life is ending because of our involvement.

Together, Sam and Dean carefully lift Meg from the chair to the floor. They grit their teeth and cringe, because with every small movement comes the sound of crunching bones and a cry of pain from the girl.

“Shh,” Sam says in a soothing tone. “We got you. It’s okay.”

“A year.” Meg gulps and breathes a raggedy breath wet with the gurgling of blood. “It’s been a year.”

I had a demon in me for less than 24 hours and I want to jump in a vat of bleach. I can’t imagine living that way all that time. It makes me wish we could have done more than just exorcised those bastards.

But with the possession came the knowledge. Yes, my demon, _Ibris_ , learned everything about me despite my efforts to lock myself up. And despite _her_ best efforts to keep me down and out, I learned a few things about her.

Like Meg’s demon Rangda is a big-time player in Hell. Azazel is the name of the demon that killed Mary Winchester. And Ibris is a low-level demon on a need-to-know basis brought in to lead Meg to Sam and Dean.

So how much does the real Meg know?

I slowly crawl nearer to Meg on all fours. Seeing her weak and shaking, struggling for breath, makes my stomach churn. But I need to ask. We need to know.

“Where did Tom take John?” I ask her.

“I don’t…know,” she gasps.

I nod a couple of times. I can’t get mad at her. She’s not a demon anymore, even though she looks exactly like the thing I wanted to skin alive not long ago. “You know things, Meg. Think about it. The demon couldn’t hide everything from you.” When Meg closes her eyes and whimpers slightly, I stop and slow down. “They took John alive because they want us to go after him. She told Tom where to go. Where was it? Where in Jefferson City?”

Her whole body quivers now. “By…the r-river. Sunrise.”

“Sunrise?” Dean repeats. “What does that mean?”

Meg gives a final gasp and her body goes limp.

“You’d better hurry up and beat it,” Bobby says. “Before the paramedics get here.”

“What are you going to tell them?” Sam asks.

“You think you guys invented lyin’ to the cops? I’ll figure somethin’ out. Here, take this.” Bobby hands Sam a huge, old book. I recognize it as the Key of Solomon. Dean and I read it together when we stayed here after I was shot. “You might need it.”

“Thanks,” Sam says.

Dean stands up and helps me to my feet. “Thanks, Bobby, for everything. Be careful, alright?”

Bobby nods. “You just go find your Dad.” He trains a pair of small, beady eyes on me when we pass. He grabs my shoulders and holds me at arms’ length. “I’m sorry, girl. I’m sorry I didn’t trust my gut and help you sooner.”

I just shrug. “The demon knew you knew. If you had tried something she would have killed you.”

“You fought like hell, kid,” he says with a clear tone of appreciation. “I’ve never heard of anyone fightin’ a demon possession long enough to come back as themselves, however brief.”

“I had to,” I say softly. I feel Dean’s hand press against my lower back. We know a thing or two about having to fight to see each other one last time.

After a hug the speed of lightning, Bobby ushers us out the door.

Sam is at the car before I make it off the front porch. I stumble on the last step and Dean instinctively catches me.

“You okay?” he asks.

“Who knew demon possession could be so tiring?” I smile, but Dean doesn’t.

“Was it…how was it…what was it like?” he asks hesitantly.

I shrug. “It was like riding shotgun in my own body.”

Dean doesn’t seem to have any words. Instead he helps me into the passenger’s seat, in which Sam graciously opens the door instead of bickering over who gets the front.

As soon as we turn onto the I-29, Dean floors the gas pedal and the Impala jumps forward. He doesn’t let up, even when we come close to other cars.

“Hey, uh, Dean?” Sam leans against the front seat. “I know time is of the essence and all, but it won’t do us any good if we’re dead.”

“It’s eight hours to Jefferson City on a good day.”

Sam and I exchange an anxious glance, which Dean notices. With an angry huff of air through his nose, he lets up off the gas and the Impala decelerates from 120 to just under 100.

We make it to the Missouri River in a record-breaking seven hours. Dean parks in the mud near a set of train tracks that cross the Jefferson City Bridge. We stop to give the poor car a break and to figure out a game plan. It wasn’t clear if Meg’s clue was about the literal sunrise, or something more symbolic. Dean doesn’t want it to be about the real sunrise, because that means waiting until tomorrow morning to make a move.

An hour passes without any of us saying a word. Dean loads an array of guns, salt, the works, and puts them in a duffel bag while Sam sits on the hood of the car, reading the Key of Solomon book. I keep my car door open for a breeze and lean my head back and close my eyes. I want to sleep. My body feels like my muscles were shredded and my guts taken out, twisted up, and shoved back in. I couldn’t sleep on the way over, just like I can’t seem to relax now. Too much tension, anticipation.

Sam suddenly jumps off the hood, making the car bounce. I open my eyes and see him stride to the back of the car, book and chalk in hand. Slowly, I pull myself up and out of the seat and use the Impala as a crutch.

“Dude, what are you drawing on my car!” Dean cries.

“A simplified Devil’s Trap.” Sam encircles a pentagram and draws some funky stretched out symbols between the points of the pentagram, then draws a triangle around the whole thing.

“What are those?” I point to the symbols.

“Um…” Sam references the book. “Magical sigils, in Enochian.”

“In _what?”_

Sam shows me the book. “It says Enochian right here. Whatever it is, it makes the thing you draw it on impervious to demons.”

“So?” Dean says agitatedly.

“It basically turns the trunk into a lock box.” Sam moves to the other end of the trunk, wipes away a spot of dirt with his sleeve, and draws another trap.

_“So?”_ Dean demands again, with more force.

“It’s a place to hide the Colt while we go get Dad.”

“What are you talking about? We’re bringing the Colt with us.”

“We can’t, Dean.” Sam closes the book. “We’ve only got three bullets left. Dad would want us to save them. We can’t just use them on any demon. We’ve got to use them on _the_ demon.”

“Azazel.”

The boys’ heads shoot in my direction. I grimace at the memory of where that word came from.

“I learned it while I was…anyway. The demon, his name is Azazel, and he’s the fucking Prince of Hell.”

Dean throws his hands out in defeat and Sam tosses the book on the trunk and hangs his head.

“If he’s here, Sam, we’re going to need all the help we can get,” Dean says.

“And what if he’s not? Do you really think he’d be hiding out somewhere around here guarding Dad if he’s the ‘fucking Prince of Hell’?”

I scowl at Sam for his unruly impression of me.

“I don’t know, Sam, but we can’t just walk in there empty-handed!”

“I don’t think he’s here,” I say.

“What, you’ve got some demonic Sixth Sense now?” Dean snaps. His words rub me the wrong way, invoke a rage towards him I haven’t felt in years. Not because he's acting like a jerk, but because the disgust in his voice tells me he now sees me as just another thing to hunt.

I submit to my instinctive desires and launch myself at Dean. “Maybe I do!” My goal was to punch him, somewhere, anywhere, but my weakened state makes me stumble. Sam reflexively catches me before I hit the ground. I stand up straight and point a threatening finger at Dean. “I didn’t become a demon’s personal smoke-chauffer for nothing! I knew a lot more while she was in me, and I’m trying my best to remember what that was now that she’s gone for _your_ sake, you ungrateful–”

“Okay, okay,” Sam says quickly. He guides my arm down gently. “This isn’t helping.” When he’s sure I won’t try to attack Dean again, Sam addresses the both of us. “Bottom line is, they’re expecting us to bring this gun. The Colt is our only leverage and you know it, Dean. We cannot bring that gun. We can’t.”

Dean stews in his anger of not being right. He narrows his eyes. “Fine.”

“I’m serious, Dean.”

“I said fine, Sam.” He takes the Colt out of his jacket pocket and waves it in our faces before opening the trunk and tossing it inside. He then strides away to brood alone.

“I think you should sit down, Harley,” Sam says. “You don’t look so good.”

“I’m fine.”

“Demon possession can’t be easy, and it hasn’t been that long–”

“I said I’m fine, Sam.”

Sam scoffs. “You’ve been spending too much time with Dean.” He then walks away in the opposite direction of his brother.

Even though I hate to admit it, Sam’s probably right. I just don’t want to come off as feeble right before we go charging into wherever to save John. I need to be on top of my game. So I reluctantly make my way back to the passenger’s side and plop down on the seat with a groan.

Dean comes running back maybe ten minutes after he left. Sam didn’t go far and saw him run up. When Dean gets closer, he looks absolutely elated.

“I think I know what Meg meant by ‘sunrise’,” he says breathlessly. He jerks his thumb behind him. “The apartment building back there, across the river. Sunrise Apartments.”

“Son of a bitch,” Sam says. “It’s pretty smart. They can possess anyone inside, make anyone attack us.”

“We can’t kill them,” I say, shaking my head. “A building full of human shields.”

“And they know exactly what we look like. But _they_ could look like anyone,” Sam adds.

Dean leans his head back. “Yeah, this sucks out loud.”

“Tell me about it,” I grumble. “All right, so how the hell are we going to get in?”

The way Dean and Sam glance at me, then each other, then back at me, rubs me the wrong way.

“What?” I snap.

“Um, Harley…” Sam starts slowly.

“Look, no offense, but we think you should sit this one out,” Dean says, and he actually sounds apologetic, which throws me off.

“No. No way. You guys did this to me when you wanted to run around like priests in Charleston. I’m not getting benched again!”

“You were just possessed by a demon and you can barely stand up without falling over,” Dean points out rationally.

I cross my arms over my chest with a huff. “What am I going to do, then? Babysit the car?”

Dean makes a perceptive face. “Actually, yeah.”

I roll my eyes.

Waiting is tough, especially when you’re waiting for your boyfriend and best friend to return from walking into a den of demons.

Sam and Dean plan to pull the fire alarm to get civilians out and then run an EMF over whoever remains. Sam was right about the seven minute response time. I can hear the fire alarm from where I sit in the Impala by the river. I can hear when the medical response team arrive, sirens blaring and lights flashing. But since then it’s been almost fifteen minutes.

I fight the urge to walk over to the building myself over and over again. The boys are more than capable of handling themselves. I just hate sitting doing _nothing_. Even though Sam insisted I could be the getaway driver, which was hardly reassuring.

Sixteen minutes. What if they’re in trouble? What if there were more demons than we thought?

Seventeen minutes. They’ll be fine. They’ll be fine. They’ll be fine. But they would have cleared the building by now, wouldn’t they? They’ll be fine…

Eighteen minutes. Screw this! Something’s wrong.

Despite the fight we had earlier, something in my gut tells me to bring the Colt. I retrieve it from the trunk and stow it in my pants. The entire way I hobble to the apartment building I try to reason with myself over bringing it. Maybe the demons won’t expect me. Maybe they know about Rangda and Ibris getting exorcised. Maybe they think I died along with Meg, and it’s just the boys now. Yeah, that sounds right.

I make it up the small slope and come across the front of the building. A large crowd waits across the street, near the fire truck and paramedic van. The boys wouldn’t risk coming out this way. I stumble along the road to the right, staying behind the cars, until I reach the side of the building. The nearer I get, the louder the sounds of a struggle become.

My heart jumps in my throat. I see them! Dean supporting John, and Sam getting his ass kicked by Tom. My hand reaches around my back. Sam’s no match for a demon in a fist fight. Dean seems to sense this as he leaves John leaning against the side of the building and runs to his brother’s aid. He basically drop kicks Tom in the face, but it does little damage to a demon. Tom throws his hand out and sends Dean flying back into the windshield of a nearby car before starting on Sam again.

Suddenly the Colt is in my hand. Pointer finger resting along the cylinder, thumb on the hammer. My feet carry me out from behind the car, my hands meet in front of me as I cock the gun. Tom straightens up into my line of fire and I pull the trigger.

Bolts of red electricity course through Tom’s body, starting from the bullet hole in his temple, just like they had with the demon that killed my dad.

Huh. Two for two.

Dean rolls off the car and lifts Sam into a sitting position. Sam’s face is bloody but he seems to be able to stand. Dean looks up, looks at me with yearning, and I nod.

We need to get the hell out of here. Dean and Sam support John across the street and we make it back to the Impala in one piece.

“I know a place,” John says weakly. “A cabin, near California.”

“Dad, we’re in Missouri,” Dean says as he starts the car.

“California, Missouri,” John clarifies tiredly. “On highway 50 towards California, Missouri. There’s a highway K that branches off it, then unmarked roads…to a cabin, hidden in the woods…”

“Okay, Dad, I got it.” The back wheels spin as Dean takes off.

The sky is black by the time we reach the cabin. While the boys take John into the bedroom to rest, I grab a canister of salt from the trunk to line the windowsills and doors. I make it halfway around the cabin before I get weak and Dean has to take the canister from me and finish the job. I sit at the table with Sam, whose face has started to swell up.

“Harley…” he says quietly. “You, um, you saved my life back there.”

“No more babysitting, hmm?” I say with a feeble grin.

Sam tries to smile, but it must hurt because he grimaces instead.

“But that guy you shot, Harley,” Dean says. “There was a person in there.”

“I didn’t have a choice, Dean. I was protecting you guys, just like I protected my dad.”

Dean bobs his head slightly, as if he’s just remembering this isn’t the first demon I’ve killed. “I watched you. You didn’t hesitate. It was almost…instinctual.”

I stare at him. What is he trying to say? “There’s no limit to the things we’re willing to do for each other. The only thing I regret is using another bullet that could have been used for Azazel.”

“You shouldn’t.”

We turn and see John in the doorway of the bedroom. He braces himself against the doorjamb, but already he looks better than he had a half-hour ago. The look he has on his face, though, as he makes his way over to me…I can’t quite describe it.

“You saved my boy, Harley,” John says softly. His features are gentle, serene almost, under the perpetual stubble and graying dark hair that’s grown long. But his eyes…there’s something about his eyes. A spark jolts through my body when he places his hand on my cheek. “You did good.”

“You’re not mad?” Dean asks, appalled.

“Mad?” John turns to his oldest boy and flashes an award-winning grin that could give Dean’s a run for his money. “I’m proud. You three are more than I could ask for. I wouldn’t be standing here if it weren’t for you.”

I glance at Dean. His eyes swiftly dart to mine and back to his dad. He nods once.

A rough wind picks up outside, whistling through the trees and the crevices in the cabin walls, making the windows shake and the lights flicker.

“It found us,” John says darkly. Sam and I get to our feet. “The demon. It’s here.” He points at Sam. “Lines of salt in front of every window, every door.”

“Harley did that earlier,” Sam says.

“Well, check it, okay?” John says with a bite in his tone. Sam grabs the canister and leaves. “Dean, you got the gun?”

“No, Harley still has it.”

Indeed I do. Tucked in the back of my pants. I reach for it as John turns to me eagerly. I continue to study his face with scrutiny.

John holds his hand out. “Give it to me.”

“Dad, Sam tried to shoot the demon in Salvation,” Dean says. “It disappeared.”

“This is me.” The corner of John’s lips pulls into a sly smile. “I won’t miss. Now, the gun, hurry.”

I finally figure out what’s off. No matter what, whether John’s pissed off or not, his eyes always shine, showing the emotion he can’t ever have on his face if he wants to remain the headstrong leader of the family. Right now, though, there’s no shimmer in his dark eyes.

I back away a fraction of an inch, and both Dean and John make a motion to come after me. Dean gets there first, separating me from John. He knows. He understands, too.

“He’d be furious,” Dean says quietly.

“What?” John asks.

“He wouldn’t be proud, he’d tear us a new one.”

I notice Dean’s right hand make the slightest motion behind his back. I slip the Colt in his hand, butt first.

Dean’s hand shakes as he brings the gun around, but steadies as he raises it and points it at John. His thumb moves to the hammer as he says, in a somber, heartbreaking way, “You’re not my dad.”

John smiles, almost wickedly, and holds his arms out. “Dean, it’s me.”

“I know my dad better than anyone.” Dean’s voice is thick, like he’s fighting tears. “And you ain’t him.”

“What the hell’s gotten into you?” John snaps.

“Dean?” Sam reenters the main room. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Your brother’s lost his mind,” John says.

“He’s not dad.” The gun doesn’t waver an inch.

“What?” Sam looks to me for confirmation.

“He’s…he’s possessed,” I say quietly.

“I think he’s been possessed since we rescued him,” Dean says.

John scoffs. “Don’t listen to them, Sammy.”

Sam looks back and forth between Dean and I nearly half a dozen times. “How do you know?”

How do you explain a gut feeling? The sensation that I was around a superior, someone powerful, like the remains of the demon inside me recognized who John was? And Dean, only knowing that John wasn’t the same because he wasn’t _angry_ enough?

Dean holds his gaze with John but I can hear it in his voice he’s got tears in his eyes. “He’s…he’s different.” I press my forehead against his back and squeeze my eyes shut. How could we have been so stupid? We got what we wanted. We have Azazel down range of the Colt. Only he’s walking around in John’s body.

“You know, we don’t have time for this,” John says, clearly irritated. Honestly, sounding a whole lot more like John. “Sam, you want to kill this demon, you’ve got to trust me.”

Sam doesn’t speak. I open my eyes and look around Dean’s arm. Sam stares at John. Then he stares at Dean. Dean only turns to his brother for half a moment before returning his attention to his target, and he doesn’t offer any other words to convince Sam. He doesn’t need to. Sam steps beside Dean and I.

John nods his head knowingly, doing his best to look betrayed. “Fine. You’re all so sure, go ahead. Kill me.”

Dean’s hand shakes ever so slightly. John lowers his head, like he’s ashamed it’s come to this. Still, Dean can’t pull the trigger.

“I thought so.” John lifts his head, revealing dark yellow eyes.

We don’t have time to react more than to be surprised before we’re each thrown back against the walls and pinned there by an invisible force. John picks up the Colt Dean dropped and examines it with an irksome look.

“What a pain in the ass this thing’s been.”

I push against the force of the demon. I guess Ibris was right. Prince of Hell’s got some serious power. Enough to hold two huge guys and me against the wall. I can’t find any weak spots. Not near my feet, knees, hips, arms. Makes me recall being at the mercy of Ibris’ movements. At least I can turn my head.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” Sam says with a mixture of agitation and desire. “We’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

“Well, you found me.” John flashes that smile again.

“I’m gonna kill you!” Sam shouts.

“Ooh, that’d be a neat trick.” John sets the Colt down on the edge of the table and gestures to it. “Here. Make the gun float to you there, psychic boy.”

Sam focuses on the gun. The last time he made something move he had way less aggravation behind his power. He should be able to send the gun itself straight through John, but he can’t even make it wiggle. Dean doesn’t question the acknowledgement of the advancement of Sam’s powers, something Sam and I never told him about. He just keeps his eyes on the demon, observing but not speaking.

“Well, this is fun.” John strolls to the window, stares out into the darkness. “I could’ve killed you a hundred times today but this…” He sighs with liberation. “This is worth the wait.”

Dean struggling against the demon’s power draws his attention. John smiles. “Your dad, he’s in here with me. Trapped inside his own meatsuit. He says ‘Hi’, by the way. He’s going to tear you apart. He’s going to taste the iron in your blood.”

Dean grits his teeth. “Let him go, or I swear to God–”

“What?” John yells. “What are you and _God_ going to do? You see, as far as I’m concerned, this is justice. You know that little exorcism of yours? That was my daughter.”

“Who, Meg?” Dean asks.

Instead of answering, John turns his attention on me. I try to keep eye contact, try to appear strong, but it’s hard to look at a man I’ve grown to care for staring at me with those wicked yellow eyes. John takes a few predatory steps in my direction.

“You, though, boy, you just take the cake. You’re the girl that murdered my sons. I should kill you on principle alone.”

I narrow my eyes. “Your son murdered my dad, so I killed him on principle alone.”

John grabs my throat and presses his body against mine. “The only reason I kept you alive was because you tracked down the weapon even my _demons_ couldn’t find. I guess you could say I was…impressed.”

“The opinion of a demon means nothing to me,” I say icily. “So why don’t you just kill me now?”

“Don’t tempt me,” John says slowly, dangerously. “Tonight is a reward for my patience, and for the losses I endured.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Dean scoffs.

“What?” John lets go of my throat and frowns. “You’re the only one that can have a family? You destroyed my children. How would you feel if I killed _your_ family?” He laughs once. “Oh, that’s right. I forgot. I did. Still, two wrongs don’t make a right.”

“You son of a bitch,” Dean says through his teeth.

“I want to know why!” Sam shouts, making John turn away from Dean and I. “Why did you do it?”

“You mean why did I kill Mommy and pretty little Jess?”

Sam presses his lips together, a gesture that he’s preparing himself for the answer. “Yeah.”

But instead of an answer, John turns back to Dean with a little grin and says in a low voice, “You know, I never told you this, but Sam was going to ask her to marry him.” He takes a few steps backwards. “Been shopping for rings and everything.” He spins around to face Sam. “You want to know why? Because they got in the way.”

“In the way of what?” Sam asks.

“My plans for you, Sammy. You…and all the children like you.”

So that’s it. John’s journal, his stories of demons trying to kidnap or hunt Sam when he was younger, it was all because Sam was the target of _this_ demon. How could anyone have ever known?

“Listen, you mind getting this over with, huh?” Dean snaps. “’Cause I really can’t stand the monologuing.”

John chuckles and makes his way back across the small cabin. “Funny. But that’s all part of your M.O., isn’t it? Masks all that nasty pain, masks the truth.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”

“You know, you fight and you fight for this family, but the truth is they don’t need you. Not like you need them. Sam, he’s clearly John’s favorite. Even when they fight, it’s more concern than he’s ever shown you. He’s more caring to Harley, even. He expressed more love for her in a single car ride than he has your entire life.”

Dean smirks. “I bet you’re real proud of _your_ kids, too, huh? Oh wait, I forgot. We wasted ’em.”

John’s face becomes a blank canvas but his yellow eyes burn. He ducks his head. I look at Dean, he just give his head a little shake. Neither of us know what’s going on. My stomach twists in a knot, the anticipation makes my heart race. Is this it? Did we finally push the demon to the limit? The answer is _yes_.

John’s head raises, and with the motion comes Dean’s scream of pain. At first nothing physical seems to be wrong with him. The demon may be inflicting some psychological pain. I was sure that was it until the blood seeps through the front of Dean’s shirt. My stomach clenches. I’ve seen that once before. On Jess’s stomach while she was pinned to the ceiling.

Soon Dean’s shirt and the front of his jacket is soaked in blood. It even makes little droplets on the floor. And Sam and I are helpless.

The demon lets up a bit. Dean’s screams stop and he breathes hard. “Dad!” he cries, staring straight at John. “Dad, don’t you let it kill me!”

John just smiles. With the tiniest nod of his head, the yells of pain begin again. But then they become quieter. Blood spills from Dean’s mouth and immediately I know his injuries are now internal. He can survive gashes to his chest, but something inside? Now I freak out.

“Dean!” I struggle against the demon’s hold to the point of breathlessness. I stop for a breather and see Sam staring intently at the Colt. His psychic powers are mediocre at best. All he’s done is shove a cabinet out of the way in a single burst of energy. Does he have the concentration, the discipline, to lift and aim a gun?

“Dad, please,” Dean begs quietly. He lowers his head in a defeated way, but then it kind of hangs there and he doesn’t move anymore.

“Dean!” I shout. “You son of a bitch, I’m gonna–”

John doesn’t cut me off like he thought he would, though. He lifts his chin ever so slightly, and for a brief moment the yellow in his eyes vanishes.

“Stop,” John whispers.

In that instant Sam, Dean and I fall to the floor, suddenly free. I look up at John and see his jaw clenching, hands ball into fists.

I know what it takes to fight a demon for the chance to just speak a word of your own. It’s like fighting a sickness, a plague that rooted in your body down to your soul. It’s in your bones, in your muscles, clouding your brain like a drug. And my demon was juvenile. I can’t imagine John’s struggle.

“Stop it,” John whispers once more before surrendering to the demon.

Sam doesn’t waste a moment. He lunges at the table, picks up the Colt and aims it at John’s chest.

“You kill me, you kill daddy,” John sneers.

“I know.”

The gun points down before going off. A special bullet pierces John’s thigh, but there’s no electricity. It’s not enough to kill the demon within. Still, John falls to the floor with a grunt and I take the moment to crawl over to Dean.

“Dean, hey,” I say in a voice that’s supposed to be soothing but just comes out really shaky. I touch his cheek, push his hair back. Then my hand moves to his soaking wet shirt. “Oh, God. You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

Sam runs over. “Dean?”

“Where’s Dad?” Dean manages to ask.

“He’s right here,” Sam says. “He’s right here, Dean.”

“Go check on him.”

I pull Dean closer so his head rests on my lap. I keep my arms around him while Sam steps cautiously over to the motionless John lying on his back.

“Dad?” Sam inches closer. “Dad?”

John suddenly gasps. “Sammy! It’s still alive! It’s inside me, I can feel it!”

That’s not possible. John shouldn’t be able to talk that freely. Azazel wouldn’t relinquish control so easily. What’s Azazel playing at?

“You shoot me!” John yells. “You shoot me in the heart, son!”

With an unsteady hand, Sam raises the Colt. What if John is just that strong? What if he was really able to suppress the demon, and it’s him begging to die? Can Sam make that decision on his own? Should he have to?

John grimaces. “Do it now!”

“Sam, don’t!” I shout.

“You’ve got to hurry, Sammy! I can’t hold on much longer!”

“Sam, don’t you do it,” Dean says weakly. “Don’t you do it.”

“Son, I’m begging you! We can end this here and now! Sammy!”

Sam adjusts his grip on the Colt, breathing hard. He’s torn between wanting revenge and losing his father, which is understandable. But we’re no good to each other dead. We can keep fighting, keep searching, just like we always have.

He lowers the gun.

“Sammy!” John lets out a yell, then throws back his head as a long jet black cloud streams out of his mouth. It hovers in the air briefly before disappearing through the panels in the floor.

When the demon is gone, John stares at Sam with a mixture of accusation and disappointment. Sam lowers his head, rubs his hand along his neck, then looks at Dean and I. All I can do is give him a nod, because he did the right thing.

“We need to get Dean to a hospital,” I say. “I don’t think he’ll make it much longer.”

John and Sam help Dean to his feet and half support, half drag him to the car. I gather anything we brought with us into the cabin, throw it all in the trunk, and then join Dean in the back seat. He lays slumped against the window. I pull him over and let him lean on me instead.

Sam drives us back toward highway 50, pushing the Impala to the limit. The poor car’s been through as much as we have the last few days.

“I’m surprised at you, Sammy,” John says crossly. “Why didn’t you kill it? I thought we saw eye-to-eye on this?” He sighs harshly. “Killing this demon comes first. Before me, before everything.”

Sam lifts his gaze to the rearview mirror and I meet it.

“No, sir,” Sam says. “Not before everything.”

I smile weakly and hold Dean a little tighter.

“Look, we’ve still got the Colt,” Sam says reasonably. “We still have the one bullet left. We just have to–”

A deafening crash. The sound of crushing metal and breaking glass. Squealing tires. The impact sends me into the door and my temple cracks against the window. I try to hang onto Dean but he slips from my grasp as the car jolts us around.

_"...the voice of rage and ruin...Well don't go around tonight, well it's bound to take your life, there's a bad moon on the rise..."_

Over the song playing through a crackling stereo is the sound of an idling engine. Smoke surrounds us, wafting freely in and out of the car. At one point, when I open my eyes with a groan, I make out the gigantic grill of a semi-truck embedded into the opposite side of the Impala. The last thing I remember is my hand tightening around Dean’s sleeve before I lose consciousness.


End file.
